US president Donald Trump has given his “blessing” to a proposed deal between Oracle and Walmart for the US operations of TikTok.
The Chinese-owned app has been pressured into finding a US partner or owner over national security and data privacy concerns.
The deal on the table is though to plan the creation of a new company in Texas. The company will be run by Oracle and Walmart.
“I have given the deal my blessing,” Trump tweeted over the weekend. “If they get it done, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s OK too.”
Update:
Oracle has announced that it has been chosen to become TikTok’s secure cloud technology provider.
The technical decision by TikTok was heavily influenced by Zoom’s recent success in moving a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud.
“TikTok picked Oracle’s new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure because it’s much faster, more reliable, and more secure than the first generation technology currently offered by all the other major cloud providers,” says Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison.
“In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers on their satisfaction with the top IaaS vendors including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud, Oracle IaaS received the highest satisfaction score.”
Oracle CEO Safra Catz comments: As a part of this agreement, TikTok will run on the Oracle Cloud and Oracle will become a minority investor in TikTok Global.
“Oracle will quickly deploy, rapidly scale, and operate TikTok systems in the Oracle Cloud. We are a hundred percent confident in our ability to deliver a highly secure environment to TikTok and ensure data privacy to TikTok’s American users, and users throughout the world.
“This greatly improved security and guaranteed privacy will enable the continued rapid growth of the TikTok user community to benefit all stakeholders.”
The Oracle Generation 2 cloud was built from the ground up to fully isolate running applications and autonomously respond to security threats. Oracle will combine its secure cloud technology with continuous code reviews, monitoring, and auditing to provide unprecedented assurance that U.S. TikTok user data is private and secure.