US tech giant Oracle on Wednesday announced a strategic agreement with the US multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T to help it move thousands of its large-scale internal databases to Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Under the agreement, AT&T will migrate thousands of existing Oracle databases containing petabytes of data plus their associated applications workloads to Oracle Cloud.
"With our state-of-the-art cloud technology, we are set to run humongous data centres for start-ups and enterprises. We have invested hugely in R&D for developing next-gen Cloud infrastructure. This agreement is very exciting for me. We have worked for months on finalising this agreement," Oracle CEO Mark Hurd told the media here during the Oracle Media Day.
The agreement gives AT&T global access to Oracle's cloud portfolio offerings both in the public cloud and on AT&T's Integrated Cloud.
AT&T has also agreed to implement Oracle's Field Service Cloud (OFSC) to further optimise its scheduling and dispatching for its more than 70,000 field technicians.
"The 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 the Oracle Cloud Platform including our highly cost effective Exadata as a Service," Hurd added.
AT&T has led the industry when it comes to virtualising and software-controlling the wide area network.
The company's goal is to virtualise 75 pr cent of its core network functions by 2020, hitting 55 per cent by the end of 2017.
"We believe that the future of the network is to be data-powered, to be software-centric, and to be fast and responsive," said John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president of AT&T Technology and Operations.