Oracle Corp. is slowly clearing a path to its public cloud with the launch today of its new Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine service.

As part of the company’s Cloud at Customer portfolio launched last year, the new offering allows companies to deploy the popular Oracle Exadata platform as a cloud service inside their own data centers. The cloud machine is available now.

Oracle’s Cloud at Customer portfolio of services is designed for organizations that wish to receive all of the benefits of the company’s public cloud services, while keeping workloads on-premises inside their own data centers. For now, the only other offering in the portfolio is Oracle Cloud Machine, though Oracle is planning add a Big Data Cloud Machine solution and possibly others in the near future, it said.

The portfolio is targeted at Oracle customers that are unable to shift workloads to the public cloud for a host of reasons. Thousands of organizations are unable to move their databases outside their own data centers because of legal and regulatory requirements, while others might have mission-critical applications built up over the years that are almost impossible to migrate to the cloud.

With the Oracle Cloud at Customer program, organizations can take advantage of the benefits of Oracle’s full public cloud, including subscription pricing and infrastructure monitoring and management services without needing to move any data off-premises.

The Oracle Exadata platform is a tool that allows system administrators to optimize the performance and efficiency of Oracle Database workloads. It was first launched back in 2008, while the first cloud-based edition of the service was released just over a year ago. The company said that when Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine is deployed on-premises in customer’s data centers, it provides exactly the same software and hardware capabilities as is available in the public cloud version. It also allows companies to move applications and data centers back and forth between cloud and their own infrastructure, the company said.

The Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine service should be well-received by customers, because virtually every information technology organization in the world is ultimately planning to shift to the public cloud, said Carl Olofson, research vice president for structured data management software at International Data Corp.

“The Oracle Cloud at Customer program provides a means of transitioning to the cloud by starting right in the data center, thereby maintaining direct interaction with the applications that remain on the premises,” Olofson said. “[Today’s release] extends that capability with all the features of Exadata, managed remotely by the Oracle Cloud team. It is a great first step toward eventual cloud deployment.”

Image: Oracle