ORACLE's Cloud Service

By Martin Ingram, CIO/SVP, Arise

Martin Ingram, CIO/SVP, Arise

Trends in ORACLE

I can’t speak to all the services out there but I can address those we use. We had been an entirely on premise oracle EBS shop. We moved to and on premise managed service organization two years ago for the entire suite (oracle DB, EBS, BI and Hyperion). With the aging of our hardware and the need to expand our foot print we decided to move the oracle DB and EBS suite into the oracle private cloud. This was done to alleviate our limited on premise resources and to eliminate the ongoing system infrastructure needed. We have kept both Hyperion and BI with the managed on premise model for now although they will move eventually as well. The move to the cloud has enabled us to get the security and patching caught up and enabled us to start expanding our EBS suite. We are looking to add PO and Fixed assets to the EBS solution in 2017.

In house oracle support is expensive and drive significant spends to maintain. The cloud solution allows us to focus on expanding our oracle footprint without the extensive labor cost to manage it. I believe we will continue to see this move to their service over the next few years as unless you have a massive oracle in house presence the cloud solution is just too cost efficient.

I like the cloud move oracle has made even if it was delayed

Challenges moving towards ORACLE Services

The biggest issues are the time to move where you have both, manage service cost and cloud cost, and the oracle pricing model which does not make the move to the cloud attractive. I would have liked them to incent the move from managed to cloud but they do not. The actual process was actually very good and the oracle service teams performed well.

I think ORACLE could open up the ability to expand and innovate. It removes the burden of specialized in house skills for the various components and removes the risk of constant maintenance and patching to allow one to focus on change, innovation and expansion. In the end we will use more licenses/services as we grow the EBS environment.

Advice for future CIOs Keep an eye on the cloud, it is a cost effective and beneficial way to grow your product stack we have been able to integrate our cloud solution with Microsoft BI, and Anaplan with ease. So it is good to see oracle being so open to expanding this functionality and being so open.

Don’t be entirely dependent on Oracles innovation look around at some of the niche market players they have some great products and work with oracle to integrate them into your ecosystem. I like the cloud move oracle has made even if it was delayed. It really opens up the door for the small and medium shop to expand and push their capacity without worrying about the backups and constant patching.

Make sure you negotiate a good price, have a vendor manage that has worked with oracle in the past and understands the intricacies of their license model and how pricing can be negotiated. It will save you time and money.