Larry Ellison: Oracle To Build New Data Center In Japan

Aaron Lazenby , Forbes.com

Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison.

Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison announced that Oracle will open a new data center in Japan this year, bringing the company’s total computing footprint to 22 data centers worldwide.

The expansion comes at a time when companies are increasingly turning to cloud computing, but have to wrestle with a variety of localization and security concerns.

Ellison, speaking at the Oracle CloudWorld conference in Tokyo Thursday, said Oracle is building new data centers to meet increased customer demand for Oracle’s cloud-based applications, platform technologies, and infrastructure.

More than 60 million users conduct billions of transactions daily running the Oracle Cloud today. “It’s gone from an idea to a multibillion-dollar [run rate] business in the blink of an eye, and growing very rapidly,” Ellison said.

Increasing computing capacity was not the only driver behind the data center announcement. Ellison noted that regional regulatory demands require that Oracle customers handle data differently in different countries. As an example, Ellison noted that in Sweden it is illegal for companies to collect data about employees’ gender—so systems that serve Swedish customers must not have fields that can be marked “male” or “female.”

IT as a Utility

Ellison said Oracle has decades of experience managing this kind of localization in the traditional, on-premises part of its application business. Moving that expertise to the cloud allows business leaders to take further advantage of that expertise, and to think of IT as more of a utility than a capital investment.

“Why should every company build its own data center?” Ellison asked. “Do you build your own electricity? Do you drill wells for your own water?”

Ellison said that the investments Oracle has made in cloud technology over the past 10 years reflect a fundamental shift in the large-business computing market—a shift that has disrupted market leaders, drawn new competitive lines, and changed users’ expectations of what technology can do.

According to Ellison, Oracle has completely rewritten its code so that business applications are compatible with user expectations for modern technology.

“Taking an old application and moving it into someone else’s data center is hosting—not really the cloud,” Ellison explained. “You can call it cloud if you like, but you’re kidding yourself, because you won’t get the same cost benefits. It won’t run on your smartphone.”

“It’s a new world,” he said.