Oracle said today that it will provide a range of cloud services to AT&T to support the carrier’s internal operations. The deal should help further AT&T SDN goals, said AT&T executive Jon Donovan, a big believer in software defined networking.
The AT&T and Oracle deal calls for AT&T to move thousands of its large scale internal databases to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. AT&T also agreed to implement Oracle’s Field Service Cloud to support scheduling and dispatching for more than 70,000 AT&T field technicians. Today’s press release suggests that the agreement will help support AT&T’s goal of virtualizing 75% of its core network functions by 2020, including 55% by the end of 2017.
“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,” said AT&T Chief Strategy Officer and Group President of AT&T Technology and Operations Jon Donovan in today’s press release.
The press release doesn’t reference cloud services that AT&T might provide to customers through the Oracle agreement. But if current plans go well, it wouldn’t be surprising to see AT&T and Oracle extending their agreement to move in that direction.
Oracle also today announced an agreement with Equinix that calls for Equinix to provide Direct Access to the Oracle IaaS offering known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
