Google Cloud to expand datacentres for delivery of managed Oracle datacentre service with Atos

Google Cloud is plotting two datacentre expansions, in Europe and North America, to offer users locally hosted access to fully managed, cloud-based versions of Oracle’s database software.

The cloud giant is working with long-time technology partner Atos to oversee the expansion of its datacentres in Frankfurt, Germany, and Ashburn, Virginia, for the project.

The sites will be kitted out with Atos’s BullSequana S server technology, which will host the fully managed Oracle workloads as part of the wider Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The managed service element will also be fulfilled by Atos, and underpinned by its own cloud orchestration, management and support capabilities.

The offering will be made available via the GCP console and Google marketplace during the second half of 2019.

Thierry Breton, chairman and CEO of Atos, said the agreement marks an expansion of the firms’ longstanding global partnership, which has previously seen it open an artificial intelligence (AI) lab in London, among other things.

“I am delighted to expand our global partnership with Google Cloud, to now bring Oracle database customers the benefits of Google Cloud Platform so that they may harness the power of AI and machine learning to solve business challenges and innovate,” said Breton.

“This announcement reinforces all the fruitful work we have done together over the last year, which has seen us bring our customers new end-to-end offers, encompassing AI, machine learning, hybrid cloud and digital workplace, and innovative services such as our joint customer AI Labs in Europe and in the US, to enable them to transform their business.”

Google Cloud Platform CEO Thomas Kurian, who joined the company earlier this year after 22 years with Oracle, said enabling a technology tie-up between the two tech brands is something their respective customers have been demanding for some time.

“Running Oracle database workloads to benefit from Google Cloud Platform is a priority for many customers,” said Kurian. “This solution from Atos means Oracle database customers can take advantage of Google Cloud’s performant infrastructure and scale, as well as our strengths in areas like AI and machine learning, backed by Atos’s expertise in business transformation and migration.”

Building out its managed database proposition has emerged as something of a priority for Google Cloud in recent months, with the firm using its annual user and developer conference in March 2019 to announce a slew of new partnerships of this nature within the open source space.

As reported by Computer Weekly at the time, the firm has partnered with seven open source database, data management and analytics companies with the intention of integrating their technologies into GCP and make them available to customers as a managed service.