Oracle now lets vendors and managed service providers buy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure outright and resell it as their own.
Unveiled at Oracle CloudWorld 2022 taking place today in Las Vegas and online, Oracle Alloy provides the OCI suite of cloud tools, services and capabilities to resellers and MSPs so that they can build on, rebrand and resell the technology to their cloud-averse customers. Oracle typically sells OCI as a private or public cloud direct to enterprise customers seeking compute, storage or other cloud services.
Customers that operate in regulated industries, such as healthcare or finance, want capabilities provided by cloud platforms but require greater control and application performance, said Chris Kanaracus, research director at IDC. Alloy meets a market need similar to Zadara, a cloud services company that sells storage and compute capabilities to MSPs located in underserved or edge locations.
"Many customers around the world want [the cloud] within their own region, their own country," Kanaracus said. "Local partners know their customers. They might have client relationships that span decades. Oracle might not enjoy those advantages in smaller markets."
Troposphere ownership
Karan Batta, vice president of product at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said the mission statement for Oracle Alloy is to extend the capabilities of OCI through partner vendors on the partner's industry terms and cast a wider net for customers.
"We're essentially giving you the mechanism to be a cloud provider to your customers," Batta said. "We are going to provide what we call an extensible platform where you can use the same tools that we use internally in OCI to build your own service and price them the way you want to your customers."
Organizations are not putting all their eggs in one basket. They're looking for different deployment methods to meet their different needs.
Paul NashawatyAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
The Alloy toolkit provides the same developer tools used by Oracle to build OCI applications and capabilities, letting resellers build specific applications or capabilities targeted to end user needs, according to the vendor. The OCI platform already has more than 100 infrastructure and platform services available for Alloy. Buyers will also have access to a preconfigured instance of Oracle Fusion Financials for customer invoicing and billing. Oracle Alloy can fully deploy within a reseller's own data center, differentiating it from private OCI cloud, which normally remains under Oracle's control and support structure.
Alloy also lets customers operate their clouds separate from the public cloud, should government regulations demand data sovereignty for instance, or connect into other public clouds and services through OCI's supported APIs. Alloy buyers can further personalize the experience by adding their brand to the OCI cloud console and customize alerts, notices and documentation.
Edge of your sky
Enterprise organizations are heading to the cloud for several reasons, such as the ability to scale out capabilities without needing to buy a larger data center or new hardware, said Paul Nashawaty, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget. The shift also adjusts technology costs from a Capex to an Opex model, he said.
Technology buyers, however, are buying into multiple clouds rather than just a single provider, such as Oracle, for a variety of reasons. Those include access to specific capabilities offered by a cloud provider and avoiding vendor-lock in, he added. Oracle has a 40-year history in the enterprise technology market, making the vendor a safer purchase for an organization. But ongoing cloud developments and enhancements could still result in customers needing additional cloud providers.
"The underlying technology that supports [an enterprise] can be multiple clouds," Nashawaty said. "The challenge that organizations face is not all clouds are equal and not all consumption models are equal.
Organizations are not putting all their eggs in one basket. They're looking for different deployment methods to meet their different needs."
Tim McCarthy is a journalist living in the North Shore of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
