Oracle offers to put its new cloud technology inside customer data centers

Oracle Corp on Wednesday said it is now offering to put all of its cloud computing technology inside its customers’ data centers for an $18 million spending commitment over three years and has signed customers in Japan and Oman.

Cloud computing emerged more than a decade ago. Technology companies, such as Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services, used their expertise at owning and operating data centers efficiently to rent out computing capacity and software tools to other businesses over the internet.

But many businesses that turned to cloud providers still handled at least part of their computing inside their own data centers. This was either for speed reasons – connecting to a cloud data center takes time for data to travel over the internet – or to meet legal or regulatory requirements about where data must be stored.