Preface added 20 November 2020: This post received a lot more attention than I expected. I must reiterate that it is not in any way an endorsement. Indeed, sparkly pink unicorns are, by their nature, fanciful. Caution must be exercised, as sparkly pink glitter can conceal deficiencies in the equine body.

Digging into my archive of past predictions… In a research note on the convergence of public and private cloud, published almost exactly eight years ago in July 2012, I predicted that the cloud IaaS market would eventually deliver a service that delivered a full public cloud experience as if it were private cloud — at the customer’s choice of data center, in a fully single-tenant fashion.

Since that time, there have been many attempts to introduce public-cloud-consistent private cloud offerings. Gartner now has a term, “distributed cloud”, to refer to the on-premises and edge services delivered by public cloud providers. AWS Outposts deliver, as a service, a subset of AWS’s incredibly rich product porfolio. Azure Stack (now Azure Stack Hub) delivers, as software, a set of “Azure-consistent” capabilities (meaning you can transfer your scripts, tooling, conceptual models, etc., but it only supports a core set of mostly infrastructure capabilities). Various cloud MSPs, notably Avanade, will deliver Azure Stack as a managed service. And folks like IBM and Google want you to take their container platform software to facilitate a hybrid IT model.

But no one has previously delivered what I think is what customers really want:

• Location of the customer’s choice
• Single-tenant; no other customer shares the hardware/service; data guaranteed to stay within the environment
• Isolated control plane and private self-service interfaces (portal, API endpoints); no tethering or dependence on the public cloud control plane, or Internet exposure of the self-service interfaces
• Delivered as a service with the same pricing model as the public cloud services; not significantly more expensive than public cloud as long as minimum commitment is met
• All of the provider’s services (IaaS+PaaS), identical to the way that they are exposed in the provider’s public cloud regions

Why do customers want that? Because customers like everything the public cloud has to offer — all the things, IaaS and PaaS — but there are still plenty of customers who want it on-premises and dedicated to them. They might need it somewhere that public cloud regions generally don’t live and may never live (small countries, small cities, edge locations, etc.), they might have regulatory requirements they believe they can only meet through isolation, they may have security (even “national security”) requirements that demand isolation, or they may have concerns about the potential to be cut off from the rest of the world (as the result of sanctions, for instance).  And because when customers describe what they want, they inevitably ask for sparkly pink unicorns, they also want all that to be as cheap as a multi-tenant solution.

And now it’s here, and given that it’s 2020… the sparkly pink unicorn comes from Oracle. Specifically, the world now has Oracle Dedicated Regions Cloud @ Customer. (Which I’m going to shorthand as OCI-DR, even though you can buy Oracle SaaS hosted on this infrastructure) OCI’s region model, unlike its competitors, has always been all-services-in-all-regions, so the OCI-DR model continues that consistency.

In an OCI-DR deal, the customer basically provides colo (either their own data center or a third party colo) to Oracle, and Oracle delivers the same SLAs as it does in OCI public cloud. The commit is very modest — it’s $6 million a year, for a 3-year minimum, per OCI-DR Availability Zone (a region can have multiple AZs, and you can also buy multiple regions). There are plenty of cloud customers that easily meet that threshold. (The typical deal size we see for AWS contracts at Gartner is in the $5 to $15 million/year range, on 3+ year commitments.) And the pricing model and actual price for OCI-DR services is identical to OCI’s public regions.

The one common pink sparkly desire that OCI doesn’t meet is the ability to use your own hardware, which can help customers address capex vs. opex desires, may have perceived cost advantages, and may address secure supply chain requirements. OCI-DR uses some Oracle custom hardware, and the hardware is bundled as part of the service.

I predict that this will raise OCI’s profile as an alternative to the big hyperscalers, among enterprise customers and even among digital-native customers. Prior to today’s announcement, I’d already talked to Gartner clients who had been  seriously engaged in sales discussions on OCI-DR; Oracle has quietly been actively engaged in selling this for some time. Oracle has made significant strides (surprisingly so) in expanding OCI’s capabilities over this last year, so when they say “all services” that’s now a pretty significant portfolio — likely enough for more customers to give OCI a serious look and decide whether access to private regions is worth dealing with the drawbacks (OCI’s more limited ecosystem and third-party tool support probably first and foremost).

As always, I’m happy to talk to Gartner clients who are interested in a deeper discussion. We’ve recently finished our Solution Scorecards (an in-depth assessment of 270 IaaS+PaaS capabilities), including our new assessment of OCI. The scores are summarized in a publicly-reprinted document. The full scorecard has been published, and the publicly-available summary says, “OCI’s overall solution score is 62 out of 100, making it a scenario-specific option for technical professionals responsible for cloud production deployments.”