Oracle pitches local Cloud option at UK private and public sectors

Oracle is hailing a "significant step forward" for software as a service (SaaS) adoption in Europe after launching a data centre in the UK, a move which is expected to open its On Demand CRM solution up to lucrative new business.

The move will enable European firms to store their data within the UK, thereby meeting EU regulatory requirements relating to the management of their data.

The news is particularly significant to public sector bodies, some financial services organisations and consumer goods organisations who in the past have been restricted from adopting SaaS solutions.

In an exclusive interview with MyCustomer.com, Steve Fearon, VP CRM On Demand, EMEA Oracle, outlined the importance of the announcement.

"We see this as opening ourselves up into markets and customers we couldn't get to before because of the EU Data Protection blocking," he explained. "We haven't made this investment lightly - we're doing it based on an incremental market that is wanting to go software as a service (SaaS) but has had those concerns. From a customers' perspective this now opens up certain people who weren't able to buy SaaS CRM solutions. Now they can enjoy world-class CRM from us in a SaaS model which is hosted within the European Union."

Public sector significance

Leveraging the Oracle stack of middleware and technology in the database, CRM On Demand has a pod architecture that historically support multi-tenant pods and single tenant pods for customers, with the new announcement meaning that Oracle now provides that pod hosted within a data centre in the EU.

At present, most other SaaS CRM providers either host applications outside of the EU or rely on third party firms to host their customers' data, but there has been movement in this area of late, with Marc Benioff announcing late last year that Salesforce.com would be launching a centre in the UK "by 2012".

Having a UK-based data centre could have huge significance to Oracle's activity in the public sector, where legislation and political sensitivities dictate that citizen-centric data must be hosted within national boundaries.

"We are looking at healthcare and primary and secondary healthcare trusts, local government, certain central governments, as well as certain industries such as some financial services organisations and some consumer goods organisations, where they are very keen to have it hosted within the EU," explained Fearon. "The EU Data Protection law basically says that there is a need for confidential citizen data to reside within the EU, and we feel there is enough demand from customers and prospects to be able to host it within the EU and make this investment and put it in place. We see this is an incremental market investment for us. This is for organisations that see the benefits of SaaS, not just from a lower cost of ownership and act-fast adoption, but also from the SaaS commercial side of things."

And Fearon reports that Oracle has already made inroads into the new fields. "We have already been in discussion with a lot of organisations. Quite a lot of the healthcare segment wants to do it, we have already got some public sector customers on the fringes of it, but we know we can explore that market further and they confirmed that they would do more." He added: "Now we have access to a market that has historically been closed."

"Oracle CRM On Demand is our fastest-growing application and hosting the application locally, represents a significant step forward for SaaS adoption by European enterprises as information assurity around sensitive customer data is becoming an ever-increasing concern of major European businesses and regulators." Fearon continues: "We see many large and medium enterprises wanting to benefit from the SaaS delivery and economic model and by now hosting customer data within the EU, Oracle is opening up this opportunity to those organisations that want SaaS CRM and want this option for hosting their European data."