Besides resiliency and robustness of the portfolio of offerings, the amount of physical data center locations hosting the IT equipment that runs a public cloud is a key competitive feature for the cloud provider.

In the case of Oracle, one of the latest entrants into the public-cloud space, that amount is about 10, according to Abhay Parasnis, senior VP of Oracle Cloud. They are in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

The company started rolling out its public-cloud infrastructure in North America in 2011 and now has about four data centers on the continent, Parasnis said during a press briefing at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Tuesday.

Oracle has also built two data centers for the cloud in Europe and two more in the Asia-Pacific.

Thomas Kurian, the company’s executive VP of product development, said in a different briefing that the European locations were in the UK and the Netherlands (specifically Amsterdam). One of the Asia-Pacific data centers is in Australia.

Parasnis did not share details about other data centers that are part of the cloud infrastructure. Neither did he want to say whether Oracle owned and operated its cloud data centers or leased the facilities from data center providers.

The company, however, is continuing to expand the data center capacity supporting its cloud services “quarter by quarter,” he said.

Oracle’s cloud strategy

Oracle is now competing in all three of the public-cloud markets – Software- , Platform- and Infrastructure-as-a-Service – although the IaaS offering is really in its infancy at the moment. The company has recently started offering a preview version of cloud-based storage to customers interested in a test drive, and a cloud-based compute service is yet to come.

“We’re going to bring that early part of next year,” Kurian said about the compute component of the IaaS portfolio.

IT infrastructure for the storage offering is built on Oracle’s own Exadata and Exalogic systems (the company launched new models of each this week), and so will be the infrastructure for its compute service. Exadata is a hardware system designed to run Oracle’s database software and Exalogic is iron for its enterprise software.

If privacy and security are a concern, Oracle will also install the machines in the customer’s own data center and create a private cloud for them, which will be managed by Oracle staff. Private cloud at an Oracle data center is also an option.

In the IaaS space, Oracle is faced with competition from other gorilla-caliber players. They include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and HP, but the latter three are also relatively new to the space.

While Oracle is planning to be price-competitive with the market, it is emphasizing its entire portfolio of products and services as a differentiator. First and foremost, all of its cloud roll-outs are about responding to needs of existing Oracle customers.

These are companies that use Oracle software or hardware or both. Many of them are consolidating and want to have the full modern infrastructure stack, which is what Oracle is trying to provide.

The company wants to provide the entire stack – from on-premise hardware through SaaS – that is fully integrated. “Full-stack offering is one of the unique differentiators for Oracle,” Parasnis said.

A key part here is Oracle wants to give customers the choice of deploying the same applications on premise, in a private cloud or in its public cloud. That was one of the big messages in Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote Tuesday afternoon.

“We’re the only cloud application company that gives you a choice of deployment,” Ellison said. Making a comparison with cloud-based CRM provider Salesforce.com, he pointed out that customers have only one choice of infrastructure when deploying a Salesforce.com application: in Salesforce.com’s public cloud.

“You can’t move that in house,” Ellison said. “You can’t move that into a private cloud behind your firewall.”