Oracle recently announced Oracle Alloy, a new cloud infrastructure platform that enables service providers, integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs), and other organizations such as financial institutions or telecommunications providers to become cloud providers and roll out new cloud services to their customers.
With Alloy, these organizations can offer a full set of cloud services, brand and tailor the experience, and package additional value-added services and applications to meet the specific needs of their markets and industry verticals. These organizations can also use Alloy independently in their own data centers and fully control its operations to help address specific regulatory requirements.
Service providers, integrators, and ISVs partner with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to provide applications and services tailored to specific industries, markets, and regulatory or government stipulations. To help these partners capitalize on the unprecedented business opportunities, scale, and performance of the cloud and innovate at the speed of hyperscalers, Alloy will enable them to become cloud providers and innovate faster with more customization and control. For example, with Alloy, partners will be able to serve the public sector and other industries that want to keep workloads in country and operate their clouds independently. In addition, Alloy will enable partners that host customers in their own data centers to unlock new opportunities for growth beyond the public cloud.
“Giving our partners and customers more choice has long been a primary focus for OCI. Today, we’re going one step further by providing our partners with the option to become cloud providers so that they can build new services faster and address specific market and regulatory requirements,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “As cloud providers, our partners have more control over the customer experience for their targeted customer or industry, including where the workloads reside and how their cloud is operated.”
“Oracle Alloy’s ability to extend OCI’s many infrastructure and platform services to partner-controlled environments could have ample appeal for end-customers, who increasingly want cloud environments that live closer to them, whether for performance, growing data-sovereignty reasons or simply to leverage familiar relationships with existing trusted service providers,” said Chris Kanaracus, research director, IDC. “They also want cloud services tailored for their industries. Moreover, at IDC we increasingly see the cloud as not something tied to a specific location but rather a consistent operating model for IT. Oracle Alloy reflects these trends.”
Offering all OCI public cloud services for partners
Alloy is a platform that offers the same 100+ infrastructure and platform services that are available in OCI’s public cloud. As a result, partners can go to market with a pre-integrated hardware and software platform deployed in their own data centers. This enables the potential to enter new markets and generate new revenue streams with cloud services already proven with thousands of customers worldwide.
“We are excited about Oracle’s vision to allow its partners and customers to further manage and customize cloud resources, which will provide broader access to public cloud innovation across the cloud continuum. Accelerating cloud adoption, while also supporting our clients’ unique industry, market, and regulatory needs, will create new kinds of business value,” said David Wood, Global Strategy lead, Accenture Cloud First.
Full control over customization and packaging
Oracle Alloy enables partners to offer cloud services under their own brand with control over commercial terms, customer relationships, and touchpoints. Providers can customize the OCI console with their own branding and tailor customer notifications, alerts, SDKs, and documentation. In addition, partners can set their own pricing, rate cards, account types, and discount schedules. They can also define support structure and service levels. With embedded financial management capabilities from the Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP offering, Oracle Alloy enables partners to manage the customer lifecycle, including invoicing and billing their customers.
Develop new value-added cloud services and apps faster
Oracle Alloy will offer software and hardware extensibility. Taking advantage of the same developer, UX, devops, and security tools currently used to build OCI native services, partners can build their own cloud services tailored to the needs of specific markets or industries. They can also bring specific hardware appliances, such as specific types of compute or mainframes, to Alloy and offer new cloud services based on them. OCI was designed to accommodate a diverse set of underlying hardware – now partners can take advantage of this architecture to serve their customers.
“As the first customer of OCI Dedicated Region, Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI) is currently running two of our most critical financial applications: BESTWAY and T-STAR, hosted on a high-performance, secure, and scalable cloud platform, provided by Oracle and operated by NRI with a high level of control to meet stringent security, data sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. We see Oracle Alloy as a valuable new offering that will not only make it easier for our customers to build and run their own applications and services, but also enable us to better integrate our own financial applications and customers’ systems. Oracle Alloy has the potential to help us further improve the business value for our financial services customers,” said Tomoshiro Takemoto, senior executive managing director, NRI.
Innovate globally, operate locally
Oracle Alloy partners will have the option to operate their cloud platform independently. They can control cloud operations to help address customer or business needs, such as regulatory requirements not met by the public cloud for specific industries or markets. This includes the location of their data center and how it is staffed and accessed, requirements to run specific versions of software and control when they are updated, and the opportunity to integrate customer support and billing with existing processes.
