CloudWorld 2023: Oracle Unveils Numerous New Offerings, Highlights Importance of Partners
Oracle is driving a distributed cloud strategy.
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At CloudWorld, Oracle announced unlimited availability of Oracle Alloy. Partners build on Alloy to provide cloud services to their customers.
“This is us providing our entire OCI stack, our software capabilities and our hardware infrastructure, to a customer where those customers are typically MSPs or SIs, or technology providers of some sort,” said Oracle’s Leo Leung. “They can take that technology stack and actually then make it available to their customers with their branding, their customer experience, all of that. So some people may have called this a cloud-in-a-box or a private-label type of cloud. That’s what this is, and we’re announcing the full availability of it.
“We’re also announcing some customers that have now taken this and are deploying it to their customers,” Leung added. “Nomura Research Institute (NRI) is one of the first customers. They currently are a managed hoster, so they host some of their financial services customers in their environments. They want Alloy because it takes them to the next step where they become a cloud provider and they can offer more than just basic hosting services.”
Also during CloudWorld, Oracle unveiled expanded capabilities on its MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It originally announced MySQL HeatWave on AWS last year, Leung said.
“This is an expansion of those capabilities, and this is taking a pretty unique technology and making it available on AWS for customers,” he said. “MySQL can host transactional applications, let’s say, for example, an e-commerce store. But what it does uniquely is that the data that’s captured — let’s say you’re doing a bunch of transactions in the store — you can also use that same data store for analytics. You can use it for training your machine learning (ML) models. You can use it for large-scale data processing. These are all things that typically require a different service in AWS.”
Amdocs is a provider of customer experience, including customer billing products, for the communications space, so there are a lot of telcos around the world that use Amdocs today, Leung said.
“And we’re going to be supporting it, both companies on OCI,” he said. “So we think that it’s a great fit for both of us because we do serve a lot of communications companies where we specialize in enterprise types of workloads, and Amdocs will offer it in a number of different ways. They will also sell services where customers may want to move into the Amdocs managed environment, or customers can also buy Amdocs or move to Amdocs separately into their own OCI environment. So we think that’s a really nice thing for customers.”
In addition, Oracle is expanding its partnership with Red Hat. Earlier this year, Oracle announced support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI, and now it’s adding additional support for Red Hat OpenShift on OCI.
“We think this is great for Red Hat and ourselves,” Leung said. “There are a lot of customers that use OpenShift. They’ll be able to take advantage of our unique capabilities around flexible virtual machines being able to run on bare metal, as well as being able to run in our distributed cloud.”
Oracle Access Governance, announced during CloudWorld, provides an easy-to-understand view of what resources individuals can access, whether they should have access and how they’re using their access, Oracle said.
“One of the challenges in security is maintaining that over time,” Leung said. “If you’ve ever been part of a large organization, it gets very complex to manage employees and application access to resources over time, over five or 10 years, or whatever. So this product is specifically focused on that aspect. Particularly for the larger enterprises, it can take many, many hours for an administrator to go and update the privileges of every user. Forget about the fact that that changes quite often. This will heavily automate that. So it is going to understand that resource pool and that user base. It’s going to score users. So it’ll start to understand risk profiles around users and behaviors, and it’ll start offering more and more recommendations to the administrator.”
In addition, Oracle unveiled Fusion Applications Environment Manager.
“Oracle actually has a full cloud infrastructure and platform like an AWS, but we also have lots of SaaS, like SAP or Workday,” Leung said. “So in many ways we’re kind of unique because we have both and we actually run those applications on our infrastructure. This offers a single pane of glass for customers that are using applications and infrastructure, which is probably unique at this point in the market because there’s basically no other company other than maybe Microsoft that has what we have, applications and infrastructure. So we have more and more customers that are using both.”
Oracle’s strategy is to try to keep security as simple as possible, Leung said.
“We are actually trying to keep the number of different security products more manageable, and in many cases we’re offering security capabilities as part of the platform as opposed to trying to sell it as a different offering,” he said. “For example, posture management, which is a set of services really looking at your environments and basically trying to assess how secure they are, and offering you recommendations to make them more secure. We call it Cloud Guard. It’s actually completely included in the platform, there’s no additional charge for it. In the meantime, we’re also adding more and more capabilities to enhance our security portfolio.”
Input from partners is influencing Oracle’s solution development, Leung said.
“For example, Oracle Alloy was very much driven by talking to many partners in terms of how they want to use the cloud and how they want to serve their customers because there are a lot of MSPs and SIs that are just using public cloud and they’re kind of providing their services on top,” he said. “And that works to some extent, but that reduces the amount of control they have over the customer experience. In some cases, it also reduces the amount of margin they can make in that business. So certainly there was a lot of input there in terms of that particular product. By the same token, we also have a lot of integrators as well as ISVs that use us as a platform for their end customers, so they definitely play a huge role in how we design our products.”
Input from partners is influencing Oracle’s solution development, Leung said.
“For example, Oracle Alloy was very much driven by talking to many partners in terms of how they want to use the cloud and how they want to serve their customers because there are a lot of MSPs and SIs that are just using public cloud and they’re kind of providing their services on top,” he said. “And that works to some extent, but that reduces the amount of control they have over the customer experience. In some cases, it also reduces the amount of margin they can make in that business. So certainly there was a lot of input there in terms of that particular product. By the same token, we also have a lot of integrators as well as ISVs that use us as a platform for their end customers, so they definitely play a huge role in how we design our products.”
ORACLE CLOUDWORLD 2023 — Oracle kicked off CloudWorld 2023 with three main themes: the importance of distributed cloud services; partners are key for customer success; and greater simplicity and control.
CloudWorld 2023 is happening this week in Las Vegas. Leo Leung, vice president of Oracle product management, said his company is driving a distributed cloud strategy.
Oracle Cloud’s Leo Leung
“Of course we have public cloud regions that we host and manage, but we strongly believe that cloud services need to be distributed and available in a lot of different ways and a lot of different operational methods,” he said. “So that’s one of the key strategies we have, and we have a few announcements in that area. We also have some infrastructure announcements, infrastructure services, but a lot of them are actually connected to partners. … And then the final area is around helping people that are administering these systems, managing these systems, whether it’s on the application layer or on the infrastructure layer, to have much greater automation, much lower maintenance, much greater simplicity, etc., and in some cases much finer grained control over services.”
CloudWorld 2023: Partners ‘Absolutely Critical’ to Customer Success
Unlike the Oracle of 10-15 years ago, partners are “absolutely” critical to customer success, Leung said.
“People often say, ‘Well, you’re going to partner with that company, aren’t you competitors?,'” he said. “And we will say, actually, the world is very different now. As a cloud infrastructure and platform provider, to adequately serve customers we actually have to work with all kinds of companies that even in the past, if we were competing or if we were competing in some other area, we need to make those services available for customers.”
At CloudWorld 2023, Oracle announced an expansion of its global collaboration with Amdocs, the provider of software and services to communications and media companies, to help customers move toward cloud and digital adoption with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
In addition, Thales, a global technology and security provider, announced the launch of CipherTrust Cloud Key Management’s Hold Your Own Key (HYOK) in OCI across all 45 Oracle Cloud regions, including the recently launched Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud and OCI’s other distributed cloud offerings. This will help support data sovereignty requirements for OCI customers globally.
See our slideshow above for more from Oracle CloudWorld 2023.
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