Announced around 16 months ago, the idea behind Oracle Cloud at Customer is to provide fully-managed cloud services using equipment located in the customer's data centre.

This allows organisations to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, while eliminating data privacy and sovereignty issues.

Oracle vice-president of product management for cloud Nirav Mehta (pictured) told iTWire that Oracle provides the hardware, software and management. All the customer has to provide is the data centre space and a network connection.

There have been other attempts to provide something similar, but they have generally been disappointing because they involve equipment from multiple vendors and leave too much work to the customer, he said.

Oracle makes Cloud at Customer as simple to buy as public cloud services, it provides an environment consistent with Oracle's public cloud so customers can mix and match as appropriate, and the company takes "clear unambiguous responsibility" for the systems – "we take care of everything" from replacing a failed hard drive to solving complex software problems, he said. It is "cloud without compromise at the customer premises".

The hardware installed by Oracle as part of Cloud at Customer now includes faster CPUs, NVMe-based flash storage, and all-flash block storage.

Cloud at Customer now incorporates all of Oracle's major PaaS categories, including Database, Application Development, Analytics, Big Data, Application and Data Integration, and Identity Management.

Oracle's SaaS products are now available on Cloud at Customer, including Enterprise Resource Planning, Human Capital Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Supply Chain Management.

All these services are sold at the same prices as their Oracle Cloud equivalents.

Another newcomer to the Cloud at Customer range is the Oracle Big Data Cloud Machine, providing customers with a full range of Hadoop, Spark, and analytics tools in their own premises but paid for on a simple subscription model.

The minimum systems Oracle will install contain approximately 100 cores for IaaS, or 16 cores for PaaS. "It's a reasonable entry point," said Mehta, pointing out that increments as small as one core are permitted above the minima.

"Oracle Cloud at Customer is a direct response to the remaining barriers to cloud adoption and turning those obstacles into opportunities by letting customers choose the location of their cloud services," said Oracle's president of product development Thomas Kurian.

"We are providing a unique service that enables our customers to leverage Oracle Cloud services, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, both on their premises and in our cloud. Customers gain all the benefits of Oracle's robust cloud offerings, in their own datacenter, all managed and supported by Oracle."

Customers using Cloud at Customer include AT&T, Bank of America, City of Las Vegas, NEC, NTT Data, State University of New York, and State Bank of India.

"There is a latent unmatched demand for this type of service" so organisations were quick to adopt Cloud at Customer, said Mehta. It is proving popular among smaller customers, notably in healthcare and local government, that are required to keep close control over their data yet have limited staff to take care of routine systems management.