Gartner recently released two key reports covering the major cloud infrastructure providers: The 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS) and the 2022 Critical Capabilities for CIPS. We’re pleased to share that OCI scored well in all criteria and use cases in the Critical Capabilities and was recognized as a Visionary.

OCI offers customers more choices and new cloud capabilities

We believe these latest analyst reports are a great reflection of our strategy to expand and improve what customers can expect from the cloud. Customers want the flexibility to access and deploy cloud capabilities wherever they need them, including specific countries and data centers, in a dedicated or sovereign model, customized and managed for them by their cloud solution provider of choice or in a multicloud environment. They want more options to get deeper and faster insights from their data and build and secure their applications. We have been hard at work, innovating and helping customers use the cloud in unique ways. I want to summarize the progress we have made with a few examples from the last year.

Providing more cloud value with the distributed cloud

• Expanded cloud options give customers more flexibility across public, multicloud, hybrid, and dedicated environments. OCI enables customers to use the cloud services their business requires, running in specific locations or across their choice of different clouds. OCI’s distributed cloud enables customers to bring applications and data into the cloud that they could never bring into the public cloud, while gaining the agility and economic benefits of the public cloud.

• Recently, at CloudWorld, among many new strategic cloud products and capabilities, we also announced our latest OCI product—Oracle Alloy—to further deliver on cloud value. Oracle Alloy enables our global partners and organizations to become cloud providers and, in turn, offer their customers cloud services built on OCI. Oracle Alloy partners can operate the cloud independently in their own data centers and fully control its operations to better fulfill customer and regulatory requirements.

• Oracle is making significant strides to provide a real solution for data sovereignty. The EU sovereign cloud regions are designed to enable customers to demonstrate alignment with relevant EU regulations. Oracle sovereign cloud is a unique subset of OCI portfolio, where the cloud regions are logically and physically separate from the existing public OCI Regions in the EU. This cloud offering can help enterprises and institutions in the European Union navigate data privacy, residency, and other regulatory guidelines.

Rapid expansion of global and local access

• OCI has launched nine cloud regions since the last Gartner evaluation in 2021, totaling 40 regions in 22 countries. We can now serve customers locally in Israel, Singapore, France, Italy, Sweden, and South Africa, and we are the first major cloud provider in Mexico.

• We also enhanced our OCI Dedicated Region offering, dramatically reducing the customer data center space required, and lowering the starting price. This offering enables many more customers with data residency and high-performance requirements to bring a fully managed cloud platform with 100+ cloud services into their own data center. We also announced our upcoming Compute Cloud@Customer for rack-scale hybrid computing.

• Vodafone is an excellent example of a new customer using the Dedicated Region as the foundation of its digital transformation. Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has expanded into a second Dedicated Region, now using OCI to host and modernize two of its key financial services SaaS applications.

• We continued to expand our cloud offerings for the US Government. We announced that the US Department of Defense authorized OCI to host Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) and Special Access Program (SAP) missions. We are now authorized for FedRAMP+, FedRAMP High JAB, and DISA workloads.

Multicloud capabilities to offer customers a choice

• OCI and Microsoft Azure launched Oracle Database Service for Azure, a new, fully managed service that enables Azure customers to easily provision, access, and operate enterprise-grade Oracle Database services in OCI with a familiar, Azure-like experience. Customers can seamlessly build Azure applications using the high-performance, high-availability, and automated management of Oracle Database services, such as Autonomous Database running on OCI.

• Since 2019, Oracle and Microsoft have partnered to deliver Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure locations around the world, including San Jose, Phoenix, Ashburn, Toronto, Vinhedo, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and this past week, we announced the opening of a twelfth location in Johannesburg, South Africa, providing direct connectivity between the Oracle Cloud Johannesburg region and the Microsoft Azure South Africa North region.

Analytics, ML, and AI easily available for your apps

• MySQL Heatwave provides a single analytics and machine learning (ML) platform. There is no need for a separate analytics database, separate ML tools, and extract, transform, and load (ETL) duplication. This past year, we made those operations even more efficient with nine new machine learning automation capabilities (MySQL AutoPilot) and a new in-database ability to build and deploy custom machine learning models (MySQL Heatwave ML). Oracle MySQL HeatWave is available on OCI, Microsoft Azure, and now, on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• OCI AI services provide prebuilt models for converting audio to text, recognizing images, detecting anomalies, determining sentiment, and forecasting results, with applications in hundreds of use cases. Whether customers have data science skills to build and customize models or want to use our ever-improving AI capabilities through APIs, OCI can help.

• New capabilities to catalog data across structured and unstructured data in Autonomous Data Warehouse, OCI Big Data Service, and OCI Object Storage and accelerate queries from Autonomous Data Warehouse into Object Storage without moving data. OCI Data Integration now enables no code data pipelines for data aggregation, ETL and ELT push-down, model application, and more.

• This year, to deliver on our commitment of helping customers solve business challenges with accelerated computing and artificial intelligence (AI), we recently announced a multiyear partnership with NVIDIA. The collaboration aims to bring the full NVIDIA accelerated computing stack, from GPUs to systems to software to OCI customers.

More native application development services and support for the developer ecosystem

• OCI rounded out services for developers with new Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) services in OCI DevOps, OCI Service Operator for Kubernetes to manage OCI resources from Kubernetes, OCI Service Mesh for our Container Engine for Kubernetes, a new Elasticsearch compatible OCI Search service, a MongoDB API for Oracle Autonomous Database, and deeper support for popular tools like Helm, Bitbucket, Pulumi, and Github Actions.

• Recently, we announced additional expansion to our App Development Portfolio with new serverless container and messaging services to simplify enterprise adoption of Cloud native technologies.

Enhanced security and capability across infrastructure and applications

• OCI launched a new OCI Network Firewall service based on next-generation firewall technology from Palo Alto Networks. We also added an array of new security services and enhancement at no extra cost. These additions include the ability to aggregate insights across open source, partner, and Oracle security professionals with OCI Threat Intelligence and OCI Cloud Guard Threat Detector. Customers can now use OCI Cloud Guard to secure both Oracle Fusion Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human capital management (HCM) with OCI. We also enabled customization of OCI Security Zones service to match customers’ specific policy requirements and launched an OCI Bastion service to enable secure, managed access to private hosts.

• OCI added 12 more global compliance programs under management, including the Health Information Trust Alliance Common Security Framework (HITRUST), ISO27701, Information Security Registered Assessor Program (IRAP) from Australia, Two Guidelines from Three Ministries (2G3M) from Japan, and Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) from Singapore.

• We continued to increase core infrastructure capabilities with dozens of enhancements, including new OCI Compute Standard3 shapes (Intel) and new OCI Compute E4 DenseIO shapes (AMD), the latter of which greatly expands the scale of our Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. We enabled cross-region replication in OCI Block Volumes for individual and group volumes. We also improved security with shielded instances for OCI Compute.

With these technical innovations, we’re excited to announce that our Oracle Cloud Lift services had accelerated the migration of more than 1,000 global organizations, including companies like Volvo Group, National Pharmacies, and Syntax, in less than one year.

I’m proud of the commitment of our developers and field engineers over the past year and very excited to continue our work with customers and partners.

Want to know more?

Read the entire Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services Report. Enterprise and cloud architects can get started with OCI by browsing and deploying our catalog of over 200 reference architectures. Engineers and developers can try Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for free today!

About this report

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services | Published 19 October 2022 |Analyst Authors: Raj Bala, Dennis Smith, Kevin Ji, David Wright, Miguel Angel Borrega

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