Deutsche Bank stuffs Oracle systems in on-prem cloud while Google scoops lion's share of white fluffy workloads

SAP banking platform still on the scene

Deutsche Bank is to migrate all its Oracle systems onto a single instance of Big Red's on-prem cloud.

The German financial services giant, which achieved net revenue of €24bn in 2020, said it would upgrade its existing database systems and migrate the bulk of its Oracle database estate to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, an on-premises deployment option of the Oracle Exadata Cloud Service.

Oracle customers generally tried to avoid Big Red for cloud infrastructure because of its high cost, one observer said.

On that point, Deutsche Bank is hedging its bets following a market match-making exercise with AWS, Microsoft, and Google to address a sprawling IT estate dating back to the 1990s.

Last December, the Frankfurt-based bank picked the Chocolate Factory to solve the legacy puzzle, with CTO Bernd Leukert saying: "With Google Cloud by our side, we have a strategic partner that will accelerate our technology transformation, enable us to use data more intelligently and provide a flexible and safe environment for us to quickly deliver new products and services."

The bank said Google's cloud would help "improve resilience, deliver new capabilities to market quicker and reduce cost over time."

Presumably, that did not include a bill of more than $6m from Big Red, but we're guessing maybe these weren't so easy, or economical, to move to the public cloud.

Oracle said the bank needed Cloud@Customer to "support applications that either will not move to the public cloud or may in the future."

The goal was to "provide a dedicated platform to support and scale the bank's existing mission-critical systems and services including trading, payments processing, risk and capital planning, and regulatory reporting," the blurb said.

Not all the bank's mission-critical systems run on Oracle, though. For more than 10 years, Deutsche Bank has been employing SAP to run its core banking systems, at least in its home markets.

"Using SAP software, Deutsche Bank aims to boost efficiency and profitability as well as to accelerate time to market in rolling out new products and services to even better serve the bank’s clients," a release said in 2010.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment on where these SAP systems were hosted or what its plans were for re-platforming or modernising them.

The recent tech overhaul comes against the backdrop of a struggle to achieve growth. Deutsche Bank's revenues have fallen from €33.5bn in its fiscal 2015 [PDF] to €23.165bn in 2019 [PDF] and it has lost €14.5bn in those five years. The organisation has also faced $18.3bn in regulatory fines since 2008. ®