Oracle Develops Cloud Customization Strategy In Line With Key Trends

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History repeats itself. If he had been around for the birth of the web and the rise of cloud computing, Mark Twain might have pointed to his suggestion that, 'No occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before… and perhaps often." In the early days of the world wide web throughout the nineties, corner shop technical support shops would take the pip that feeds the Internet and package it up so that consumers could buy the web from their local techies, who would play the role of Internet Services Provider (ISP). Today we have largely aggregated that option and many of us get our web from conglomerates, large-scale or even nationally run ISPs. The same thing could be about to happen with cloud. Commercial organizations want to be able to work with Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) - very often via Independent Software Vendors (ISV) - that are capable of coalescing, aligning and packaging a set of cloud-based application and data services in a way that delivers to the precise (or as close best-fit as possible) needs of the business. It's a trend that Silicon Angle's John Furrier has called ‘next-gen cloud' and he sees it reflected in how AWS is developing and positioning its mighty cloud platform. 'In particular, we are seeing applications become full platforms or clouds themselves running on top of AWS as the cloud infrastructure. This is a good thing, for AWS and for organizations globally,' explained Furrier.

The same thing is happening with cloud and data elsewhere, for a start, at Oracle.

Appropriately named to convey a sense of fused and mixed chemical elements, Oracle Alloy is the company's new cloud infrastructure platform. Designed to enable service providers, integrators, independent software vendors (basically, any company of a resonable size such as a financial institution or telecommunication providers) to become cloud providers and roll out new cloud services to their customers. Branded cloud services

According to Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, by using this new cloud technology offering, organizations can offer a full set of branded and tailored cloud services with a user experience tuned that provides additional value-added services and applications to meet the specific needs of a customer's market and industry vertical. These organizations can also use Alloy independently in their own datacenters and fully control its operations to help address specific regulatory requirements. Service providers, integrators and ISVs partners will be able to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to provide applications and services tailored to specific industries, markets and regulatory or government stipulations. 'Giving our partners and customers more choice has long been a primary focus for OCI. Today, we're going one step further by providing our partners with the option to become cloud providers so that they can build new services faster and address specific market and regulatory requirements,' said Magouyrk. 'As cloud providers, our partners have more control over the customer experience for their targeted customer or industry, including where the workloads reside and how their cloud is operated.'

To help these partners capitalize on the business opportunities presented here and be able to scale up to the challenge, Oracle says it is on hand to help organizations to ‘innovate at the speed of hyperscalers' - a term we use to describe the big three cloud players AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, plus the second-tier would-be hyperscalers vying for share of voice in this market.

As a working example of Alloy, partners (which in this sense means the financial, telco or other organizations providing cloud democracy, not Oracle's normal use of of the word partners, which is reserves for other tech vendors in any form) will be able to serve the public sector and other industries that want to keep workloads in country and operate their clouds independently. In addition, Alloy will enable partners that host customers in their own datacenters to unlock new opportunities for growth beyond the public cloud.

Partner-controlled environments

Chris Kanaracus (research director at IDC), stated that Oracle Alloy's ability extend OCI's platform and infrastructure services to partner-controlled environments could be appealing to end-customers. These customers increasingly desire cloud environments that are closer to them for performance, data-sovereignty, or to leverage existing relationships with trusted service providers. These customers also need cloud services that are tailored to their industry. IDC sees the cloud as more than a location-specific service. It is a consistent IT operating model. These trends are reflected in Oracle Alloy.

Alloy is a platform that offers the same 100+ infrastructure and platform services that are available in OCI's public cloud. As a result, partners can go to market with a pre-integrated hardware and software platform deployed in their own data centers. This enables the potential to enter new markets and generate new revenue streams with cloud services already proven with thousands of customers worldwide.

Oracle Alloy ‘partners' will have the option to operate their cloud platform independently, this means they will be able to control cloud operations to help address customer or business needs, such as regulatory requirements not met by the public cloud for specific industries or markets. This includes the location of their datacenter and how it is staffed and accessed, requirements to run specific versions of software and control when they are updated.

Oracle Alloy also allows partners to offer cloud services under their brand. They can control the commercial terms, customer relations and touchpoints. Providers have the ability to customize OCI console with their branding and personalize customer notifications, alerts, and documentation.

Partners can also set their own rates, pricing, account types and discount schedules. Partners can also set their own support structure and service levels. Oracle Alloy integrates financial management capabilities from Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to allow partners to manage customer lifecycle, including billing and invoicing.

Your cloud, make it yours

Mark Twain, who is well-known for his vast library of great sayings and advices, also stated that education consists mainly in what we have not learned.

We have learned something over the past three decades of cloud and web: we want personalized, customized and crystallized technology services that work for us in every scenario, on any device.