In direct contrast with Verizon’s exit from its cloud offerings, ATT chooses to located petabytes of operational databases in Oracle’s Cloud. This represents a big win for Oracle as well as confirmation that it is tech rather than telco companies which will dominate cloud capabilities long term.
“We believe that the future of the network is to be data-powered, to be software-centric, and to be fast and responsive,” said John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president of AT&T Technology and Operations. “We call this three-pronged approach AT&T Network 3.0 Indigo, and it’s all about enabling a seamless and intuitive network experience for our customers. This collaboration with Oracle accelerates our network transformation and migration to the cloud to expand efficiency, performance, and reduce cost while improving overall customer service.”
In more detail
AT&T’s goal is to virtualize 75% of its core network functions by 2020, and to hit 55% by the end of 2017. To accomplish this, it is virtualizing and software-controlling its wide area network.
The agreement gives AT&T access to Oracle’s cloud portfolio offerings both in the public cloud and on AT&T’s Integrated Cloud. This includes Oracle’s IaaS, PaaS, Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). AT&T’s objectives are to increase productivity, reduce IT costs, and enable flexibility in how it (AT&T) implements SaaS applications across its enterprise.
In addition, the telco will implement Oracle’s Field Service Cloud to improve its scheduling and dispatching for its 70,000+ field technicians. For example, AT&T will combine its own machine learning/big data capabilities with Oracle’s technology to increase productivity, on-time arrivals and job duration accuracy of AT&T’s field technicians.
All this will involve moving thousands of AT&T’s internal databases to Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Thousands of existing Oracle databases containing petabytes of data, plus their associated applications workloads, will enter the Oracle Cloud.
Conclusion
When Oracle’s CEO, Mark Hurd, says “This is an historic agreement. The Oracle Cloud will enable AT&T to use Oracle technology more efficiently across every layer of the technology stack” he’s right. This is an example of a telco going to the computer industry to find greater value than that which AT&T, no computing slouch in its own right, expected it could deliver on its own.
The contrast with the Verizon exit from cloud services is stark. Rather than provide its own cloud services to its own operations AT&T sees greater gains in obtaining its computing and management from another organisation’s cloud technology portfolio. The increase in concentration of cloud providers continues. Once implemented the sheer size of this deal enables Oracle to stay in touch with the four general purpose hyper-cloud providers, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft.
