Cloud-wary UK 'is ready' for Oracle one-stop IaaS model, says UK boss

"They can just look at their current architecture and say, 'Do we really want to do that again?'" says O'Kelly

The cloud-wary UK enterprise "is ready" for Oracle's new push into providing SaaS, PaaS and now IaaS, and will "see the advantages" of picking one vendor for most eventualities, senior vice president of Oracle UK Dermot O'Kelly has told Computing.

Speaking to O'Kelly at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco today, we asked him about Oracle's particular policy towards the UK as founder and CTO Larry Ellison spent the last couple of days making a big stink about beating other vendors - particularly Amazon - in the IaaS game.

"I mean obviously, being British, we don't like to hammer the competition as much as Larry likes to," said O'Kelly.

"It's difficult to compare. But as a global company we think, if something makes sense for a UK company, it probably makes sense for an Australian company, so it's a little bit homogeneous like that.

"We think our message now - that hopefully you've picked up - is that we operate at all levels of the cloud, and the fact that for a lot of customers it was SaaS - that was a natural place to land and then they thought a little about leasing compute, but thinking about the whole infrastructure for platforms and applications - that was conceptually harder," said O'Kelly.

A recent report from Computing Research found that 77 per cent of UK organisations use little or no cloud in their organisations, though at the same time 75 per cent say their use of cloud will increase within the next 12 months.

Perhaps this is the nerve O'Kelly and Oracle are hoping to hit. But it remains to be seen whether cloud-averse customers will be comfortable going 'all in' with one provider like Oracle.

"Most of our customers are still on-premise, but there's a desire to go to the cloud," said O'Kelly.

"And we want to help them. Where we're unique in this is we can say, 'Well, frankly it doesn't matter - if you want to run it on-premise, it's fine, if you want to run it in the cloud, it's fine'.

"Will we be everything in IT for every company? No, because we don't do everything in IT. But our answer would be, we really believe in giving the customer choice. If they just want to buy compute, or an HR platform, fine. Companies tend to think in terms of projects, but they often don't think of it together."

O'Kelly said many businesses are suffering because they have deployed cloud in an uncontrolled, piecemeal way, effectively building "an accidental cloud infrastructure".

"Is it a good idea to let users buy whatever they want on a credit card? You're going to end up with a mess. You need to have a strategy.

"I think the UK is wary, but they see the advantages in having maybe one supplier [provide] the majority of their stuff, not all. The UK is ready."

O'Kelly suggested that UK IT decision makers who in the past have struggled to integrate disparate on-premise systems will be attracted to the idea of dealing with one main cloud provider.

"I think they'll get it again that, in the cloud, having a set of applications from a single vendor may be more efficient. And it's not like they haven't got the comparison point, because they can just look at their current architecture and say, 'Do we really want to do that again?'"