Recently at a live event on September 17th, 2017, Executive Chairman of the Board and CTO of Oracle Corp, Larry Ellison unveiled the company’s two new Oracle Cloud Programs.
The primary focus of these programs is to reduce costs by improving automation and providing more flexibility to the customers. This would help them derive better value from their current software investments in Oracle.
Besides, the new licensing options would be made available for customers who intend to use Oracle cloud services. As per the claims made by Oracle, this would provide a significant cost advantage of 50% or more as compared to their competitors.
Why did Oracle to launch this ambitious program?
In the past few years, organizations have been facing many hurdles while choosing to switch over to the cloud services owing to security, data protection issues and also fearing loss of control along with the cost factor. Apart from that, companies have also been facing the challenges and complexities of managing the cloud. In some cases, organizations have not been able to derive the best benefits from their investments made on on-premise software investments using cloud services. They had to completely rely on IaaS services or compromise on many of the essential database features of PaaS layer.
The new program announced by Oracle seeks to address some of these growing challenges faced by companies in the adoption of cloud services by improving and making the entire process of buying and using cloud tremendously simple, efficient, and cost-effective.
Key Features of the New Oracle Cloud Programs
Bring Your Own License to PaaS
The new cloud program aims to improve the ability of the customers to bring their on-premise license to Oracle PaaS. Compared to the current IaaS program, this would help in cutting down the costs of choosing Oracle Cloud for customers who have already paid for using their on-premise license and can re-use it for Oracle Database, Middleware as well as Analytics products.
This provides a solid opportunity for customers who already have the on-premises license to make use of their existing investment for using Oracle Database at a significantly lower price as compared to the old PaaS prices. Besides, it’s much faster and cheaper to run Oracle Database on Oracle IaaS along with better features that are offered by Oracle when compared to other cloud services – this makes it a lucrative option for lowering the costs of full ownership in the industry.
Universal Credits provide better flexibility to customers
Oracle is planning to introduce the most flexible buying and consumption model for cloud services with its Universal Credits. Because of this, customers can enjoy unlimited access to all their existing as well as future Oracle PaaS and IaaS services – this also includes Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud at Customer. Universal Credits is a simple, upfront contract that would be able to provide discounts to the value of 30% in return for customers who would be ready to shell a total dollar amount, without the need to mention what services would be bought in advance.
Customers will be able to switch services or drop specific services without notifying Oracle and can use their new credits for new services as and when they are made available.
New version of database offering by Oracle
Oracle will be introducing a completely new autonomous version of its database which aims to cut down the costs of human errors and labor involved in the process. This next generation database, which is based on machine learning, will help in automation and tuning of the database. Oracle is planning to launch this autonomous version by the end of this year.
The main idea behind this self-driving database is to eliminate the labor cost associated with managing and upgrading the database. It also can avoid the downtime related to human errors which can otherwise prove to be costly. Oracle also believes that using Oracle’s autonomous database would be economical and cheaper when compared to conventional human-controlled databases. Customers who would prefer using Oracle’s autonomous database will be able to cut down their costs by half or even more in this manner.
Oracle will be able to offer guarantees on these cost savings to their customers through the SLAs which be provided through their services. The SLA will also state the guarantee of availability that will restrict total downtime to around 30 minutes every year, including planned and unplanned for customers using the Oracle’s autonomous database.
In a nutshell
This new launch of Cloud Services by Oracle will be able to assist software vendors to enjoy the economies of scale through cloud services and provide a greater degree of automation and platform tuning. This move could help more number of businesses to transition to cloud services and reap higher returns through increased revenues.