AT&T will migrate thousands of its existing Oracle databases and related application workloads to run in Oracle Cloud as part of a long-term agreement under which it will tap Oracle platform-, infrastructure-, and software-as-a-service offerings.
Those AT&T databases and applications, which underpin a range of the global telecom carrier’s services, contain many petabytes of data.
As part of the agreement, AT&T will also implement Oracle’s Field Service Cloud application to optimize scheduling and dispatching for its more than 70,000 field technicians. With OFSC, AT&T will combine its own machine learning and big data capabilities with those in the Oracle application to increase the productivity, on-time arrivals, and job-duration accuracy of its field technicians, the company said.
OFSC is the first of many Oracle cloud applications that AT&T will implement as part of this agreement, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said during a press event at Oracle headquarters on May 4.
“This is a historic agreement,” Hurd said in a statement. “Oracle Cloud will enable AT&T to use Oracle technology more efficiently across every layer of the technology stack. This includes AT&T’s massive redeployment of Oracle databases, which will be provisioned entirely from Oracle Cloud Platform, including our highly cost-effective Exadata as a Service.”
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For its part, AT&T, under a program it calls Network 3.0 Indigo, has led the telecom and pay TV industries in virtualizing and software-controlling its global wide area network, allowing it to introduce new services and respond to customer needs more quickly. The carrier’s goal is to virtualize 55% of its core network functions by 2017, 75% by 2020.
“It’s all about enabling a seamless and intuitive network experience for our customers,” said John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president of AT&T Technology and Operations, in a statement. “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.”
Why Companies Want ‘Driverless Software’
One of the biggest challenges companies of all types face today with their on-premises databases, middleware, and other platforms, is finding the experts to install, configure, maintain, and patch that software, noted Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development, at the Oracle press event.
By moving their databases and workloads into the Oracle public cloud—as well as into their own clouds, but fully managed by Oracle under its Cloud at Customer offering—companies will need to do less of that IT heavy lifting and can instead focus more on their core businesses.
Kurian compared this dynamic to the autonomous automobile movement, calling Oracle’s platform-as-a-service offerings “driverless software.” If customer applications need more or less capacity, the platform automatically compensates as needed—sans a mechanic.
Rob Preston is editorial director in Oracle’s Content Central organization.
