EMEA User Group Leader Summit at UKOUG Conference December 2017
Feedback, by Steve Daheb,
Senior Vice President IaaS/PaaS Business Groups (Oracle).
Question 1:
How is cloud transforming Oracle? And how could/should user groups align with Oracle’s cloud strategy?
Cloud has opened up a whole new market and opportunity for Oracle in the past few years. It has enabled us to reach a new set of customers that we couldn’t reach with just the on-prem software delivery model. We are now able to address all segments of the market from Large Enterprises to SMBs including Startups. Cloud has also had a big impact on how Oracle develops and delivers services to our customers. Cloud has brought us closer to our customers and we can now get direct feedback from our customers and translate that into product improvements and release cycles at a much faster rate. We as a company also have transformed our IT infrastructure and moved to our own Cloud services. Oracle itself is going its own transformational journey by using the very same cloud products our customers do. We are constantly learning from our own experiences to deliver better quality product and services to our customers and partners.
Our vision is to deliver a complete, open and secure Cloud to our customers that offers choice of deployment. We look forward to working with you on getting better insights into our customers and partners. We want to learn about their journeys to the cloud and how they are consuming Oracle and other technologies to meet their business challenges.
Question 2:
What are the top 3 Innovative Cloud Trends you forecast in the next 12 months?
1. Autonomous Cloud Services - This is a new category created by Oracle. We anticipate move towards “self-driving” software just like self-driving cars in the automotive industry. Autonomous DWCS is our 1st service in this category which is was announced at OOW this year.
2. AI/ML - More AI capabilities being embedded in all apps (SaaS) and Platform (IaaS and PaaS). AI will offer customers ability to make more insightful decisions, improve productivity with automation, deliver improved customer service, help innovate at a much faster pace...
3. Containers and Serverless Computing - Light weight and fast deployment and provisioning platform to deliver next generation applications. With Serverless we are moving the industry towards truly utility based computing, where customers only pay for what they use vs. pre-purchased units of capacity.
Question 3:
What % of customers are moving to which clouds? I.e. Are more EBS moving to IaaS/PaaS or SaaS?
We offer our customers choice on how they want to move their existing On-Prem apps to the Cloud. They have the option to do the following:
- Lift and Shift their existing Apps to the Oracle Cloud
Oracle offers both migration tools and support to partner with our customers on this journey to the cloud.
Question 4:
Is Oracle planning to expand the amount of data centers worldwide and will these centers all get Oracle Cloud 2.0 including OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)?
Oracle is aggressively investing in new data centers around the world. We currently have data centers in NA, EMEA, Australia, and Asia (Japan). We have plans to add additional datacenters in ASIA, and LAD in 2018. We just expanded the Frankfurt DC with OCI. New datacenters will support OCI as well.
Question 5:
Oracle Cloud trials are 30 days. Amazon, Azure and Google all have a free forever tier, and their trials are 12 months. Any plans to offer a free tier?
Oracle is the only vendor in the market that offers a Free Trial where users can test production workloads vs. simply getting access to a low tier of services. For example Amazon gives users access to only a micro instance for compute during their free trial which is not enough to test a production DB. You as a user have to upgrade to a larger instance (paid service) to try it. In contrast all IaaS and PaaS services on Oracle Cloud are available to our users during the Trial period. They can try any production level service during the 30 Days - giving them a true experience of running their enterprise production level workloads on the Cloud. We are constantly evaluating our trial experience and looking for ways to improve it. For now our plan is to continue to offer $300 credits for 30 days to try Oracle Cloud.
