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US technology giant Oracle is poised tounveil a major investment in its Australian operations, setting up its cloud platform and infrastructure services in the country as part of a global push to try and compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft in selling computing power.

Oracle already sells cloud-based software products in Australia, but previously any local customers wanting to use Oracle to provideits computing capacity or run its applications would have had it hosted overseas.

Recently appointed Oracle Australia and New Zealand managing director Rob Willis declined to say how much it was costing to set up its own data centre infrastructure in Australia, but conceded it was a "huge" investment, which the company felt was necessary in order to expand its local presence and pick up new customers in small and medium-sized operations.

The company has recently faced accusations from rivals, such as cloud software provider Workday, that it has failed to genuinely embrace the cloud computing era, but Mr Willis told The Australian Financial Review the decision to base its services in Australia showed it was going "all in".

"If you are going to open up something like this you have to get to a certain point and that investment is huge," he said.

"You have to secure the facility, then you have to ship in a whole bunch of hardware andpeople to put it alltogether beforeloading in all the software and makingit work. So it is a huge investment, butwe have found elsewhere that what we get back from making that investment is worth it."

Last month Oracle announced it was expanding its cloud services globally, with new regions in North America and EMEA, but the move into Australia will enable it to target the large number of potential clients, which still refuse to have their data hosted offshore due to data sovereignty concerns.

In setting up in Australia, Oracle is going someway to match market leader AWS and Microsoft, which has local data centres for its Azure cloud, and is ahead of Google's Compute offering, which is due to set up in Sydney this year.

Oracle's Australian data centre isbased in Sydney and is already operational, rather than building its own data centre, it is working with a specialist provider, which it declined to name.

Mr Willis said that, while there remained some customers that were unwilling to move to the cloud, the vast majority wanted to and had been waiting for Oracle to make this move. While the company has traditionally attracted larger enterprises for its database systems and products, the software as a service (SaaS) model, where companies pay for usage on subscription has opened up the market to customers of all sizes.

"One of the most exciting things about the cloud is that it meets the typical requirements of our large customers, but also generatesinterest from smaller and medium-sized companies, who wantthe benefits of enterprise style infrastructure," he said.

"We are now veryfocused on trying to do a better job of addressing those customers."

Last week the local boss of one of the company's principal rivals for the medium-sized SaaS clients, Workday, said it was taking market share off Oracle and SAP rapidly, and accused the two older companies of putting modern interfaces on the top of creaking old systems.

Whereas Workday was founded in the cloud era, it was accusing Oracle of seeking to hold on to the past where companies paid more money to have all their software and technology run on their own premises - something Mr Willis refuted.

"There is no doubt that Oracle has a huge history of building software and doing things on-premise,but at the same time there is no doubt that that is shifting very rapidly into being a company where everything it does is cloud first," hesaid.

"Our history is in the on-premise world, but we are in a massive transition and transformation, which is rapidly approaching the stage where we say we are just a cloud company."

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Tech giant Oracle makes huge investment to bring cloud services to Australia - The Australian Financial Review