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AT&T moving databases and application workloads to Oracle’s cloud

Oracle and AT&T have announced a strategic agreement whereby the telco will move thousands of its large scale internal databases to Oracle’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), the companies have announced.

AT&T will gain global access to Oracle’s cloud portfolio, both in the public cloud and on AT&T’s Integrated Cloud, to include Oracle’s IaaS, PaaS, database as a service, and software as a service. This will help ‘increase productivity, reduce IT costs and enable AT&T to gain new flexibility in how it implements SaaS applications across its global enterprise’, Oracle added.

“This is an historic agreement,” said Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle in a statement. “The Oracle Cloud will enable AT&T to use Oracle technology more efficiently across every layer of the technology stack. This includes AT&T’s massive redeployment of Oracle databases, which will be provisioned entirely from the Oracle Cloud Platform including our highly cost effective Exadata as a Service.”

AT&T partners with other cloud companies outside of Oracle. CEO Randall Stephenson took to the stage at IBM’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas back in March, arguing the importance of the Armonk firm’s ‘enterprise strong’ cloud message. “I don’t believe we’re more than three or four years away from being indistinguishable from the ‘data cloud’ to the ‘network cloud’…we’re riding off what you guys are doing,” he said.

The company also renewed its vows with Amazon Web Services (AWS) last October to ‘help both existing and new customers more efficiently migrate to and utilise the AWS cloud with the AT&T network’.

This announcement can also be analysed in the context of Verizon selling its cloud and managed hosting services arm to IBM earlier this week. While the companies described it as ‘a unique cooperation between two tech leaders’, others saw it differently, with John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, noting last year when Verizon shut down part of its cloud service, that “telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud.”