Oracle UC and BYOL simplifying buying and consumption of cloud services: Sunil Mehra, Oracle India

As a customer-centric company, Oracle’s focus is to constantly try and improve customers’ ease of doing business. In line with this commitment, the company is transforming the way all companies buy and use cloud by providing unmatched flexibility and choice. Sunil Mehra, VP – Cloud Platform, Oracle India, shares more

Please highlight some of the common customer challenges when it comes to cloud adoption.
Some of the typical challenges cited by enterprises for delaying their cloud journey include complexity; inability to balance spends across different services; constraints created by limited visibility and control over cloud spends, and not knowing how to fully leverage current on-premises software investments in the cloud. Most enterprises understand that cloud is a business imperative. But despite the improved performance, agility, and opportunity for innovation extolled by experienced cloud users, some businesses still find their migration efforts thwarted by fear of change. The first step is to start by acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. Every enterprise should choose a path to the cloud that works best for their business. They should also design a phase-wise cloud transition strategy to minimise disruption to the business, while also extracting the best value from legacy IT investments.

Making the decision to move enterprise workloads to the cloud is certainly a critical one. As a decision maker, it’s essential that you choose a cloud platform to deliver the outcomes you need, and work with a provider with a proven track record of guiding enterprises through IT transformations.

Tell us more about Oracle’s commitment to making cloud simpler and easier for organisations.
Oracle has combined the lowest prices with the highest performance and more automation to deliver a lower total cost of ownership for customers. Oracle’s two new programmes make it simpler and easier for organisations to buy and consume cloud services, helping them get more value from their existing Oracle software investments. These programmes are Oracle Universal Credits (Oracle UC) and Oracle Bring Your Own License (Oracle BYOL) to PaaS. These two programmes together address customers’ cloud adoption challenges by improving and simplifying the way they purchase and consume cloud services, thereby helping organizations to make a smooth transition to the cloud.

How do these two programmes improve and simplify the way customers buy and consume cloud services?
With Oracle Universal Credits (UC) pricing, we’re offering flexible buying and consumption choices for Oracle’s PaaS and IaaS Services. Customers have one simple contract that provides unlimited access to all current and future Oracle PaaS and IaaS services. Customers gain on-demand access to all services, plus the benefit of the lower cost of prepaid services. Additionally, customers get:

• The flexibility to upgrade, expand, or move services across data centres based on their requirements
• The ability to switch PaaS or IaaS services they use without notifying Oracle
• The benefit of using existing cloud credits for new services, when they become available

With Oracle BYOL to Oracle Database PaaS, we’re delivering increased value through license mobility. We’re enabling customers to reuse their existing software licenses for Oracle PaaS – including Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, Oracle Analytics, and more. Customers with existing on-premises licenses can leverage that investment to:

• Use Oracle Database Cloud at a fraction of the old PaaS price
• Further reduce management and operational costs required for on-premises maintenance by taking advantage of this PaaS automation

How does this strategy help Oracle in delivering lower TCO vis-a-vis other cloud service providers?
Oracle UC and BYOL will give our customers the freedom to expand, move, cancel and try new things quickly. Customers get complete flexibility, and the more services they consume, the more cost effective a proposition it’ll become. Oracle’s ongoing strategy is to deliver lower total cost of ownership than competition. We’re already seeing a great demand for these with our Indian customers. With our recently announced autonomous services, we’ll get even more competitive on the pricing front.

What kind of momentum are you seeing for your cloud business in India, especially on the cloud platform side?
Oracle is now the world’s fastest growing cloud company at scale and the only company that can offer a complete portfolio across all three layers of the cloud: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. We’ve already made significant strides in the Indian market. We continue to see more and more Indian businesses across different industries moving to Oracle cloud for hyper growth. We expect our PaaS and IaaS to be our biggest growth drivers over the next couple of years. There are several examples of customers who have benefited from our modern, enterprise-grade cloud platform and infrastructure services. Our customers include Safexpress, NCDEX eMarkets, Birlasoft, Zensar Technologies, ValueLabs and Helpage, to name just a few. These customers have been able to fast track innovation and deliver superior experiences to their end customers. Some of our customers that are at initial stages of innovation and deployment include ICICI Bank, New India Assurance, Kotak Bank, HDFC Life, AU Small Finance Bank, NSE, Comviva, Yes Bank.

Could you share further details on the business benefits realized by some of your cloud customers?
State Bank of India (SBI), one of our key, long-standing customers, was one of the first customers in the APAC region for our unique cloud at customer offering. They’re currently using this solution for app-dev and UAT. SBI also leveraged our modern, enterprise-grade cloud platform for their recent ‘Digitise for Bank’ hackathon.

Safexpress is a good example in the logistics space. The customer was able to significantly increase performance efficiencies and transform its customers’ experience by using Oracle Management Cloud. Safexpress was able to get insights on what was happening across their entire IT infrastructure, detect problems, such as slow transactions, and be able to manage and resolve them proactively and faster.

Another good example is of Birlasoft. The company was able to transition quickly to a modern, easily accessible and flexible cloud infrastructure using Oracle IaaS offering. Birlasoft was thus able to free up significant time and capital, innovate more and accelerate the growth of their core business.

NCDEX eMarkets is one more customer success story that comes to my mind. The customer wanted to migrate from an on-premises IT environment to a modern, scalable, enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure and chose Oracle. The migration was easier than the customer imagined, while delivering the same top-notch experience to their end customers as before.