The company plans to tap the SMB segment through its partner ecosystem with cost-effective bundled cloud solutions By Harshal Kallyanpur
Oracle recently announced its new bundled solutions for small and medium enterprises that would help them deploy a cloud infrastructure in a cost-effective way. The company is offering integrated solutions around its x86 and entry level SPARC servers, that would bundle together server, storage, database, networking and the company’s flagship virtualization pieces as an integrated solution.
According to Stuart Long, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Sales Consulting Director, Systems Division, Asia Pacific and Japan, Oracle, while a lot of organisations would like to adopt cloud computing, cost could be a major barrier in the long run, though data security and regulation could be some of the entry level concerns. He believes that while many enterprises would adopt cloud in the near future, a lot of them will move some applications back on premise, since it would be expensive to run them in the cloud.As a cost-effective answer, the company is offering its hardware, software and application solutions bundled, that enterprises can purchase as a single solution to deploy a cloud infrastructure internally or have one deployed and managed by a partner at his end.
Says Long, “Typically customers believe that Oracle is expensive and we are hoping to change that by offering these pieces via the cloud model.”
Oracle typically focused on the large enterprises with these server, storage and virtualization solutions. However, a lot of SMBs today are taking their operations global. Just as the larger enterprises, these organisations would like to have 24×7 availability and the flexibility to scale up their operations as their businesses grow and new opportunities come by. However, they are held back by financial constraints and often do not have the budgets for large scale capital expenditure (CAPEX) on IT.
The company hopes to tap this sector by offering these organisations their enterprise grade solutions, bundled together and delivered via partners, such that the overall entry cost and total cost of ownership over time, can be lowered. SMBs also find it expensive to buy proprietary solutions due to the associated licensing and other costs. Furthermore they do not have the necessary expertise or the funding to invest in the same, to integrate and set up the infrastructure. Oracle believes that this new delivery model will help them address these issues.
“When an organisation buys the bundled solution, it buys the servers, OS, virtualization layer and applications and support in a single price. Solutions from our competitors require customers to buy, hardware, software, the management stack separately and integrate them, which can become quite expensive,” he says further.
Oracle is claiming a cost of USD 20,000 for a 25 (Virtual Machine) VM bundle which is about less than USD 1000 per VM including a 3 year support on a CAPEX model. It is also offering the financing options which would enable enterprises to deploy the solutions at a cost of USD 30 per VM per month.
According to Mitesh Agarwal, CTO and Director, Systems, Oracle India, the company will leverage on its existing channel partner network to take these solutions to the market. It is also helping its software channel partners bundle the hardware along with their software solution and sell it as bundled offering.
“A partner should either be able to provide it as a cloud, or help the customer set it up as a private cloud. So there could be channel partners who would set up the infrastructure at their end, and provide it to the customer and manage it for him, while others would help them adopt and deploy it internally as a private cloud,” says Agarwal.
Oracle has close to 1000 partners in India, some of which are application focused and some look at the middle ware piece, while other are database focused. By making the hardware piece also available to them, the company is allowing these partners to take an integrated solution to market.
The company has created a virtual template for every piece of software that it offers. Close to 90 such templates can be downloaded from Oracle’s website. These templates run natively on top of the company’s virtualization solution.
Independent Software Vendors (ISV)s wanting to put their application on top of Oracle solutions can leverage on these templates to do so. For instance, if an ISV wants to put a database application on top, they can use the Oracle DB or MySQL database templates to do so.
The company is also allowing the partners to target industry verticals depending on based on their strength and outreach across these verticals. However Agarwal also observed that BFSI, Telco, Manufacturing and Retail are growing and therefore the company can expect some early demand from these sectors.
