BT and Oracle collaborate to make it easier for global organisations to move to the cloud

Jun 28, 2016 09:24 BST

BT becomes the first global network services provider to offer direct access to the Oracle Cloud

BT and Oracle today announced that they are working together to help organisations across the world take advantage of performance, cost and innovation benefits of the cloud. Oracle customers will be able to leverage the high performance, reliability, and security features of the BT Cloud Connect environment to gain direct connectivity to the Oracle Cloud.

While organisations understand the promise and many benefits of the cloud, many are concerned about security and performance issues associated with cloud technologies. This is especially true for business-critical enterprise workloads that frequently demand high levels of availability, security and performance. Together, BT and Oracle are aiming to remove those barriers to cloud adoption by providing options for connectivity from hybrid enterprise data centres to the Oracle Cloud.

With BT Cloud Connect for Oracle FastConnect, customers can use a private connection based on BT’s IP Connect VPN service, which is designed to predictably, securely and consistently exchange large volumes of data between the Oracle Cloud and their own on-premises environment. BT will connect directly to Oracle’s Cloud locations in Amsterdam and London, giving customers access from anywhere in the world to services provided in European data centres. Through pre-provisioning via BT Cloud Connect, BT can cut the typical dedicated connection deployment time from months to days.

The Oracle Cloud is used by many of the world’s largest organisations. It supports 70 million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day and runs in 19 data centres around the world. With the Oracle Cloud, customers can take advantage of the broadest and most integrated public cloud portfolio across all layers of the IT stack, while also having the choice to bring the Oracle Cloud into their own data centres via the recently announced ‘Oracle Cloud at Customer’ offering. Oracle FastConnect is part of Oracle IaaS, and intended to enable organisations to quickly meet IT and business goals by leveraging a set of core capabilities such as elastic computing, networking and storage.

This news builds on BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy by allowing its multinational customers to connect to the cloud through a centrally managed high-speed network with highly predictable performance, reliability and embedded security features.

Luis Alvarez, CEO Global Services, BT, said: “Direct and reliable access to data and applications hosted in cloud environments has become critical to organisations as they embark on their digital transformation journeys. We are accelerating our drive to be the world’s leading cloud services integrator and I am proud that BT is becoming the first global network services provider to offer direct access to the Oracle Cloud.”

“Cloud is the fastest growing part of Oracle’s business,” said Thomas Kurian, president of Product Development, Oracle. “This partnership will help our customers leveraging the Oracle Cloud execute on their business strategies by taking advantage of the breadth and depth of BT’s global network and its Cloud Connect offering for their high bandwidth connectivity needs.”

BT and Oracle aim to offer the service in the final quarter of calendar year 2016.