Oracle cuts price of OCI Dedicated Region to expand user base

In an effort to appeal to a broader range of users, Oracle is reducing the entry price for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Dedicated Region. OCI Dedicated region, which started off as a service to enable enterprises to take advantage of cloud technology inside their data centers while complying with data residency and other regulatory guidelines, offers a portfolio of public cloud services along with Oracle Fusion SaaS applications.  

The reduction in prices will enable enterprises to start at an entry price of $1 million a year, Oracle said, adding that the new dedicated region requires 60%-75% less data center space and power on average. Up to now, the service required a minimum commitment of $6 million a year in consumption over a three-year period.

“The move to reduce prices show that Oracle is confident with scaling to a larger number of customers with smaller footprint. The total addressable market grows massively with that,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research, adding that OCI is one of Oracle’s big bets that is showing signs of success.

The price reduction follows quarterly results in which Oracle reported that demand for cloud infrastructure combined with the rise in sales of SaaS services boosted revenue to $11.8 billion.

Distributed cloud strategy with Roving Edge Infrastructure

Oracle, which has 38 OCI Dedicated regions globally, is also offering a distributed cloud strategy with the service, along with the option of extending it on hybrid architectures using Roving Edge Infrastructure.

Roving Edge Infrastructure consists of local edge devices that contain scalable server nodes designed to allow enterprises to connect to Oracle’s cloud services and applications.

The OCI Region is operated as a commercial and government public cloud in 38 regions, and can be interconnected with other clouds for multicloud architectures, or act as the control plane for hybrid cloud offerings, Oracle said.

The company also introduced a new OCI Compute Cloud@Customer service in preview. The compute service is a rack-scale system meant for smaller environments than OCI Dedicated Region and will enable organizations to run applications on OCI-compatible compute, storage, and networking in their data centers, Oracle said.

“The main aim behind launching Compute Cloud@Customer is to primarily allow existing customers to move to the cloud and look at other rivals or alternatives,” Mueller said.