Advantages of OCI & Being Cloud First for Success

At Oracle CloudWorld 2022, Oracle had a very positive and optimistic view of the cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Last quarter, Oracle added about 1,000 new paying customers for its OCI business. Compared to its main competitors, Oracle has developed cloud regions in more countries and cities, giving its clients more choices for the cloud in terms of storage, services, and computing. Oracle’s cloud business is expected to exceed $20 billion next year, growing by over 50%. Multi-cloud interoperability is one of the reasons OCI is booming. Oracle’s second-generation cloud launched after its competitors’ first-generation clouds. Therefore, Oracle has been able to architect OCI more performantly, securely, and sustainably. [1, 2]

What’s the Cloud?

The cloud is a delivery model where storage, servers, apps, and other technologies are delivered via the Internet. It offers cost savings, scalability, high performance, and economies of scale. There are several types of cloud computing services to select from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud deployments can be public, private, or hybrid.

A hybrid cloud is a mixture of on-premises, private, and public cloud services, all working together to support an entire organization’s data. This configuration is flexible depending on an organization’s storage requirements. It can include private assets and other applications to balance the possible variables from resource usage to compatibility with legacy applications. [3]

Cloud by the Numbers

Annual Public Spend for All Organizations

Use Cases Driving Cloud Deployment: [4]

• 50%: Cost optimization across on-premises/public cloud resources
• 45%: Extend the IT capacity of on-premises infrastructure without capital expense
• 34%: Off-site location for backup/disaster recovery/business continuity
• 30%: Bring disparate IT environments together under a single management framework
• 29%: Workload migration among different settings as needed
• 22%: Enable workload components to operate in different environments
• 21%: Centralized data repository for business processes running in various IT environments
• 18%: Compatible IT environments for all stages of the app development lifecycle

Cloud & Adoption: Enterprises, Mid-Market & SMB

• 94%: Enterprises already use a cloud service
• 63%: SMBs using cloud services
• 30%: IT budgets allocated to cloud computing

Cloud Adoption & Usage

OCI – Why Enterprises Are #1 Priority

• 60%: Enterprise IT infrastructure will be spent on the cloud by 2025
• 86%: Cloud consumers expect spending to increase in future
• 75%: Enterprises attest to OCI’s superior security design compared to on-premises offerings

OCI vs. Competitors

• >3X Better compute price-performance versus competitors
• 1/4 The cost for outbound bandwidth
• 20X Input/output operations per second (IOPS) more than base AWS for half the price
• 44% Lower compute costs for high-performance computing (HPC)

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – An Intro

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was designed for higher performance, lower cost, and easier cloud migration. It focuses on automation, AI-based enterprise applications, and the Internet of Things (IoT). OCI can integrate with Oracle data integrator, Golden Gate, and SOA Cloud service.

OCI - The Features:

• Applications & Integrations: Integrate SaaS, cloud, and on-premise workloads with prebuilt or custom connectivity with OCI. Process automation with drag-and-drop design. Integrate any ERP, HCM, or CX application faster with seamless connectivity for multi-experienced developers. Gain insight across end-to-end digital processes and map data with ML-powered recommendations.
• Cloud@Customer: Oracle’s complete portfolio of public cloud infrastructure, fully managed cloud services, and Oracle Fusion SaaS applications accessible in a data center. It enables users to run applications faster and at lower costs using the same high-performance capabilities, autonomous operations, and low-cost subscription pricing in OCI.
• Compute: Unique and flexible virtual machines (VM) for optimal price performance, with bare metal computing, GPU and HPC instances, and OS management.
• Connectivity & Network: OCI enables clients to manage and scale their networks and connect securely to custom and isolated virtual cloud networks (VCN). It uses a network visualizer, dynamic routing gateway, and flexible load balancers with encrypted traffic at 100 Gb/sec and minimal latency HPC. FastConnect and VPN services to connect customer data centers.
• Data Platform, Science, & Analytics: These features ingest any data format from on-premise and cloud sources. A data catalog enables clients to keep track of their data. OCI provides self-service data analytics with Oracle Analytics Cloud and uses artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning services.
• Database: OCI offers fully automated databases optimized for transaction processing, data warehousing, or document-oriented workloads – less time is spent managing databases. This feature runs up to 3X faster than any other solution and accelerates the development of JSON-centric applications with low latency response and elastic scaling.
• Developer Services: Quickly build, deploy, and manage modern cloud applications using developer-friendly tools and services. Includes Kubernetes services, container, and artifact registry. Oracle DevOps automates the software development life cycle (SDLC), infrastructure operations, observability, and messaging.
• Identity Services: Cloud Guard is used to identifying security threats. Federation and certificate services are also offered.
• Integrated SaaS, PaaS, & IaaS: OCI integrates with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
• Migration Services: Data migration and database replication services.
• Security & Governance: OCI helps organizations reduce the risk of security threats for cloud workloads with consistent compliance adherence across regions and around-the-clock monitoring. It simplifies governance with capabilities and policies with SQL-like syntax.
• Storage: Provides high-performance computing and low-cost storage options, including file, object, and archive storage with backup services.

Oracle, OCI & Azure – Going the Hybrid Route

Many Oracle cloud storage options exist for hybrid, multi-cloud, and dedicated environments. Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure provides organizations with a straightforward migration path to a multi-cloud environment that includes Oracle Database capabilities, such as Oracle MySQL Heatwave. With seamless interoperability, clients can innovate using the best of OCI and Microsoft Azure. This low-latency, private connection between two leading cloud providers brings flexible innovation while maximizing ROI.

The Cloud Providers – an Analysis

Ready for Migration - Now What?

What can be migrated to OCI? Everything

• Oracle On-Premise Applications
• Enterprise Databases
• Web/Mobile Applications
• Edge Servers
• SD-WAN
• Network Administration Tools
• Platforms for Business Services
• Productivity Software
• Remote Desktops
• IoT

Real-Life Case Study: SoftClouds – Migrating Oracle Knowledge Management (OKM) to OCI

SoftClouds recently completed a significant migration to OCI. This project was implemented at a global automotive client based in Japan with over 100 years of history. This client requested a global deployment of Oracle Knowledge Management (OKM) to OCI. They had several technical challenges to overcome an expensive on-premise data center operation, data center resource availability, inability to scale up the resources quickly, and delays from hardware supplies and vendors.

Oracle Knowledge Management (OKM): An Intro

OKM is an enterprise-class knowledge management system that stores and retrieves knowledge to improve the reader’s understanding, enhance employee collaboration, and improve the customer experience (CX). Customer service employees commonly use knowledge management systems and software, such as contact center agents and field service technicians. However, clients can use them directly through various self-service digital customer service platforms, including websites, digital assistants, and phone apps.

OKM provides organizations with consistent, accurate, and searchable knowledge content through different channels, such as digital, agent-assisted, and self-service. OKM offers clients and agents natural language processing (NLP) search, analytics about the content used, and authoring and publishing tools so service teams can help clients quickly find solutions to their problems.

The Results after Migrating OKM to OCI:

After working with SoftClouds to migrate from OKM to OCI, the company reduced its cost of operations. Cloud migration helped with its expansion since it used a single knowledge management (KM) system that expanded to all markets. The migration provided integrated solutions with sub-systems, improved scalability by making it easy to add/remove resources quickly, was safer than an on-premise system, and was easier to maintain for DevOps because OCI is a cloud-based system.

Future of Cloud & OCI

Cloud adoption, especially hybrid cloud migration, will happen faster from now on. According to Oracle, cloud services and license support revenues were $8.4 billion for the quarter, up 14% year over year. OCI drove revenue in this category. Cloud and on-premises license revenues came in at about $1 billion, up 11% yearly. Cloud revenue was $3.6 billion, up 45% year over year. Cloud infrastructure revenue was about $1 billion, up 52% yearly. Infrastructure cloud services had an annualized gain of $3.2 billion. OCI consumption revenue, which more than doubled, helped drive the category. [1, 2]

OCI is Set for Success

SoftClouds has done multiple cloud migrations in the past. With a complete end-to-end portfolio of industry-leading solutions, we make cloud plans a reality for our clients. Our team uses a simplified, consistent approach that optimizes, protects, and controls their success. We offer secure data protection and enable our clients to receive more from their workloads.

With our help, our clients can establish a multi-cloud strategy quickly with applications that reinforce customer value. Our team frees up their resources for strategic innovation and creates a fully integrated turnkey solution that’s the fastest path to hybrid cloud success. We move our clients’ workloads while saving them time and money with full-stack integration that’s easy to deploy and manage.

My Thoughts

Multi-cloud interoperability is an essential step in the evolution of cloud computing. Clients mix and match applications and infrastructure from various cloud vendors – this remains an opportunity for Oracle. Their clients choose application infrastructure technology from multiple clouds and then have those different clouds coexist and interoperate gracefully.

In many cases, hybrid cloud computing offers the perfect solution between the benefits of modern cloud technology and the practical limitations of cloud capabilities, such as when high-performance computing is involved. It also allows companies to take a phased approach to public cloud adoption for their transition needs based on legacy hardware, proprietary data, and other potential reasons.