Oracle is in the process of adding a new data center in Sydney, which will be the company's first data center used to provide CRM On Demand services that is located in Australia, Steve Au Yeung, Oracle executive VP Asia Pacific said during a press briefing at Oracle's OpenWorld 2010 conference in San Francisco.

"The data center  will be a dedicated environment for our CRM On Demand services," Yeung said. Oracle has secured an anchor customer for the facility from the Australian public sector. While the company has been providing its cloud-based customer-relations-management services to Australian customers, some potential customers, including the one the new site will support, were reluctant to sign on knowing that their data would be stored outside of the country, he explained.

Data center provider HarbourMSP will host Oracle's infrastructure in its Sydney data center to support the service, according to an itnews report.

The Sydney facility will also serve a test-bed function for Oracle in providing services from a data center located in Australia.

Yeung also shared some details about Oracle's broader strategy in Asia-Pacific markets now that the company's product portfolio becomes more defined after completion of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The new portfolio "will challenge any IT vendor in the market place to have that kind of breadth and depth," Yeung said.

The company is looking at cloud computing as a big opportunity for its new product roadmap, which is to deliver fully integrated and complete hardware-and-software solutions, including servers, storage, network and applications. Oracle's projections for cloud-based-solution market in Asia-Pacific are in line with those of Gartner, which forecasted this market to reach $24bn in 2013.

One of Oracle's biggest markets in the region is Greater China, where the company has observed a change in IT spending habits of the customers. "In the past they (were) more geared toward in-house development," Yeung said, explaining that Chinese customers used to prefer buying components and integrating them on their own. This attitude has shifted and today's customers are more interested in pre-integrated solutions, which falls nicely within Oracle's strategy.