Why Independent Software Vendors Run Their Apps on OCI - Full Show
[MUSIC PLAYING] DAVID PROFOZICH: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Oracle Cloud Platform Virtual Summit, where we will feature why independent software vendors, or independent SaaS providers, run their applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. My name is David Profozich, and I'm delighted to be your host for this event. My role at Oracle is to lead our go to market strategy to embrace SaaS providers, to embrace ISVs, both to recruit ISV to Oracle's cloud and to build go to market strategically with those SaaS providers who embrace our cloud.
Today, we have more than 200 SaaS partners who are operating on OCI. We're very grateful for your support. Let me just talk for a moment about the agenda today. I'm going to kick us off with a brief keynote where I'm going to discuss Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, really why SaaS partners have selected OCI. I'll talk about some of the technical differentiation that OCI provides. I'll also talk about our go to market model and how we embrace SaaS partners in the market together.
Following my comments, I'll turn it over to David Hicks, who serves as Oracle's vice president of business development for our ISV ecosystem. David is going to host three of our most strategic SaaS partners, Altair, Korber, and WorkForce, all of whom have bet their business on Oracle Cloud and in each case who share a go to market partnership with Oracle. Following David and our good friends, you'll hear from Karan Batta. Karan is vice president of cloud engineering. What Karan is going to do is talk about the unique needs of the SaaS partner ecosystem and how OCI is set up to enable your business. Karan will also talk about how our public cloud platform differentiates from others.
And very important, I think, for us to share with you what's unique, what is the special sauce, if you will, around OCI. And following Karan, I'll be back to wrap things up, and I'm going to point you to some Oracle programs and resources and provide some ideas around actions forward. Really looking forward to this program.
Now, I'd like to tie up one of our most strategic partners, Zoom. All of you have heard of Zoom. Zoom will talk a bit about how they have scaled on OCI, their experience from a performance, security, and overall client experience perspective. Here's Zoom. [MUSIC PLAYING] BRENDAN ITTLESON: We bring teams together to get more done in a secure and frictionless video environment.
Our ease, reliability, and innovative video first unified communications platform provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat. By the end of April, we peaked at more than 300 million daily meeting participants. We had three main requirements. First, scalability.
The growth we were seeing was massive and quick. Then we had performance, and then finally, reliability was key. Oracle's team was able to jump into action and help us scale quickly, as well as understood our future cloud needs. The big thing there is we were able to manage our global deployments with a very efficient devops team. We get great performance at lower costs, as well as excellent service and support. Oracle's second generation cloud infrastructure will help Zoom continue to deliver flawless service to its customer base, adopting the changing demand, and lead the video communications industry.
[MUSIC PLAYING] DAVID PROFOZICH: OK. Let's get started. So I'm excited to take you through a quick journey around Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and how Oracle proposes to partner with you. I'll start out by introducing Oracle as a technology innovation provider, and I'm also going to talk, as well, about how we can assist your go to market. So of course, we want you to embrace Oracle Cloud technically, and we know that we have a lot of differentiation to offer in that context. We also want to have you consider us as a go to market partner.
Next, we'll explore some of the benefits that Oracle can deliver. Benefits in terms of cost reduction, in terms of improving your profitability and accelerating growth. As well, I'd like to talk about our security differentiation.
At Oracle security is job one. It's something Larry Ellison started talking about in 1977, and here we are in 2021. And we are still talking about security as a core differentiator for the company. And then I'd like to establish with you some ideas around steps forward, so how might you engage the Oracle team, my team, the company, our technical engineers, architects, to consider Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to enable your business.
So let me talk a little bit about how we position Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and how we think about Oracle Cloud. I already mentioned Larry Ellison's name once. He founded this company in 1977. He continues to run engineering. We're all in awe of Larry Ellison.
He likes to talk about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as something that we needed to build to serve as the custodian for our own SaaS properties. Larry often talks about how we're the only company on the planet that offers a broad portfolio of SaaS properties. We are the world's largest ISV ourselves, and we offer an infrastructure platform. That is unique in the market. Back in 2014, Larry hired a gentleman by the name of Clay Magouyrk, as well as some other senior leaders who previously had worked on a gen one cloud platform infrastructure at Amazon. Clay now leads our OCI engineering organization 10,000 plus engineers later, and his aspiration and mission and what we've execute on is a very complete, broad collection of services that reside on OCI that serve, as I said before, both the Oracle SaaS estate as well as third party SaaS providers.
And really, that's sort of the key focus, if you will, for Clay's organization. Now, when Larry recruited Clay and a number of other senior leaders back in 2014, the mission he gave them was to build from the ground up an infrastructure platform that would uniquely serve the enterprise. And that's exactly what we've done.
And you know what? It's taken us a little while to build that out. Here we are seven years after we started, and the momentum is incredible. When we think about enterprise grade, we think about mission critical.
We think about massive scale from a security perspective. We call it our gen two enterprise cloud, highly differentiated from the wave of gen one public clouds that were built 10 to 15 years ago. And as I said earlier, OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, serves as the foundation for Oracle SaaS globally and provides the market leading price performance profile, if you will, across any public cloud, which makes it, we believe, the best platform for enterprise grade applications. OK, so let me just talk a little bit about some of the benefits that you might expect in a partnership with Oracle as you select OCI. Number one, cost reduction. So we have made our platform available at a differentiated price position.
We've done that not only because the price is lower, we've also done it. We've built architecture that enables us to charge you a lower price, and obviously, that gives you flexibility and impacts your cost of goods sold. Next, scale and performance. Again, starting at the inception of Oracle, this has always been a big focus for Larry and for the company. Today, we know that OCI operates at 5x faster than other public clouds. It is especially effective for enabling high-performance computing platforms.
We have a number of ISVs, SaaS providers in the HPC space who have embraced our low-cost storage, massive scale networking architecture, and computer architecture to enable their business. We provide SLAs that are differentiated, as well. We don't just provide commitment around availability. We also give SLAs for performance and manageability. Those are differentiators in the public cloud space.
I've talked about security. I'll keep talking about security. It's a big differentiator for OCI. We talk about defense in depth and multiple layers of security.
It would be a whole other keynote to talk about our security technology, but this is our part of our special sauce, what makes OCI and candidly, Oracle differentiated in the market. And then lastly, market coverage, and I talked about this a little bit a few moments ago. Our aspiration is to build true partnerships, from a go to market perspective, with strategic SaaS providers. We are, as I said earlier, a very large SaaS provider, but we also know that we can't reach every functionality. We don't have all of the capabilities that many of our partners have, so we look for ways to partner together to extend the reach.
So if you were to operate your business on OCI, you would potentially, as well, have access to our hundreds of thousands of SaaS customers. A number of our ISV partners have integrated to our SaaS properties. We love that.
And there's just tremendous scale that comes with that, not just technically, but also from a commercial perspective. OCI itself, 80 million users a day, 61 billion transactions, so it's a very mature platform. And as I said before, it's the fabric for all of our SaaS properties directly.
Currently, we have 29 OCI regions globally. We just opened up our 29th right before Christmas in Santiago, Chile. We'll be at 36 here in the next few months.
We're operating at about one new region per month, and that will continue as we continue to scale OCI globally. Some of the players, partners that have embraced us. I mentioned earlier that we have over 200 SaaS companies operating on OCI. This is just a subset of that list, and I'll just point out briefly that the SaaS players who have embraced OCI are very diverse in terms of segments and categories. We have a number of security players, companies like Cybereason and Cisco and McAfee, that have embraced our platform.
In the communications space, of course, Zoom and 8x8 are large clients of ours. In the HR space, WorkForce, CX Space, Exactly. I could continue, but the point is that very, very diverse when it comes to enterprise grade applications. We generally find that the market leaders in their categories embrace OCI because of its price performance, because of its scale and security, and often because of the go to market potential that exists in partnering with Oracle. So let me summarize by suggesting a few actions.
First off, if you're thinking about Oracle as a partner, you're thinking about OCI to enable your business, I'd encourage you to select an application. And let's spend some time focusing together with you on a specific application that you might migrate to OCI. We have a very skilled and comprehensive technical team that would love to engage with you around your architecture review, and beyond that, we'd like you to try it.
I mean we'd encourage you to try it for free. We would love to support you as part of your evaluation of OCI, and then in parallel, what we might consider together is let's take a look at what the potential is in the market together. Perhaps you should become part of the OCI Marketplace.
There are a number of other ways we can partner together. I mentioned earlier that a number of our ISVs have integrated with the Oracle SaaS platforms that exist today in the market, so many ways that we can work together as partners to drive top-line revenue growth for you, in addition to the natural benefits that OCI will provide technically. OK.
Well, that's it for now. Let me turn it over to my good friend David Hicks. [MUSIC PLAYING] DAVID HICKS: Hello. My name is David Hicks, and I'm vice president of business development for the ISP ecosystem here at Oracle. What I tend to find is that our partners very often have a very unique story in their journey to the cloud, and they tell that story far better than we at Oracle can ever do.
As such, today, we're actually going to hear from three very valuable and long-term partners specifically around that journey. They're going to share how they overcame technical challenges, the criteria for selecting OCI, and what the cloud is doing for them and their business, and most importantly, for their customers, and how they are partnering with Oracle in a joint go to market effort. Just to provide a little bit of background, here are the three partners that you'll hear from today. First is Altair. They're a global technology company providing software and cloud solutions in the areas of simulation and data analytics.
Basically, high-performance computing. We know that's very cloud intensive, and they're leveraging OCI to run their data analytics, their product development, and large scale high-performance computing applications in the cloud. Not only have they seen significant performance increases, but they've also saved over 25% in their computing costs by moving to OCI. Next, we'll hear from Korber. They're a global supply chain technology leader, formerly called HighJump, that provide software solutions that address all aspects of the supply chain execution, including design, simulation tools, warehouse and transportation management.
Korber moved its warehouse management platform from some competitive, leading public cloud providers and on premise to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, lowering their costs by over 25% while improving performance by 40%. And finally, we'll hear from WorkForce Software, a leading global provider of cloud-based workforce management solutions, whose leveraging OCI to accelerate time to value for their customers and bring operational efficiencies and has seen over a 30% improvement in its performance compared to their traditional colocation facilities. Let's now hear from our three partners. SAM MAHALINGAM: I'm Sam Mahalingam, chief technology officer for high-performance computing and cloud solutions within Altair.
Altair is a global software and services company, which is primarily focused on computer aided engineering, simulation driven design, high-performance computing, and data analytics. Getting access to state of the art hardware immediately and instantaneously is extremely beneficial to our customers, and what I have seen with Oracle is that the moment we see the state of the art is being released into the market, I see that Oracle immediately brings such newer instances onto the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. That is truly a benefit for Altair in terms of helping our customers leverage the state of the art performance with respect to these newer hardwares.
So I think with our engineered offering on the cloud, primarily, what's happening is we are shrinking the time to innovation, or the time to revenue, by rapidly provisioning these environments in a very, very short period of time, like for example, today, for the physical appliance. In the past, it was taking us about four to six weeks, but today, it only takes two weeks from the time someone cuts a PO to the time we deliver the physical appliance to them and get it accepted. But when it comes to the virtual appliance and the cloud, it is not even two weeks.
It's less than an hour. They can actually have a high-performance computing cluster, along with all of the applications, and they can immediately start to innovate. So I think this is one of the biggest benefits in terms of providing our solutions through the Oracle Cloud. It is in terms of time to provision which really shrinks the time to revenue. SEAN ELLIOTT: My name is Sean Elliott, and I am the global chief technology officer at Korber Supply Chain Software. At Korber, our focus is on providing leading class global solutions for the supply chain of today and the supply chain of tomorrow.
We think of that in a very converged fashion, meaning that Korber Supply Chain provides not only software, which is where I focus my time, but also a full breadth of machinery solutions, implementation and consultation solutions, as well as all of the software technologies running on OCI that power the supply chain. And I think there were two or three key criteria for us. First and foremost, if you come to understand the technology landscape in supply chain, there's a specific requirement and a very substantial requirement for performance. Supply chains tend to operate, especially depending upon industry, at massive scale.
We have customers that ship literally millions of orders a day. The requirement, as a result, is to look for not only class leading performance, but really, class leading price performance and to understand that while we need things that operate at real time global cloud scale, we also need to offer always the best total cost of ownership and return on investment for our customer. We also need that capability across a very complex technology landscape. As a provider, Korber has over time brought together many different technology solution providers. Through acquisition, through merger, and through organic innovation, we've grown a portfolio that has a variety of technologies under the covers.
We needed a provider and a partner that can not only assure us of class leading reliability, of class leading scale, and of class leading price performance, but also could do so across a very wide and complex set of technologies that our customers rely on day in and day out. And the third piece was as we think about the future of supply chain, we needed ultimate flexibility in our technology selections for the future. We needed a partner that not only brought class leading platform as a service technologies in the cloud, but also was flexible, comfortable, and open to additional technologies we might bring on our own because they fit the needs of our market better than the platform as a service solutions that were provided by Oracle themselves. We needed to know that we could find the ultimate solution to all of those different questions in one partnership, rather than selecting a variety of partnerships, each of which suited maybe one or two of those requirements, but none of which satisfied all of them.
We found that answer in OCI. What we found with Oracle was really two things-- one part, technology and one part, organization. And I can't emphasize frankly enough the value in A, making the decision and in being successful after the fact that that organization really provided. Technology isn't easy, but technology is really only the foundation. It's the people that surround it and the organization and process that surrounds that's made this a success for us.
As a result, what really made this successful for us was the partnership, was the willingness of Oracle not only to land class leading technology in our business, but to bring people alongside us, architects to teach us how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure worked at a detailed level. But the infrastructure that we laid and put in place as a consequence of the partnership with Oracle has been now battle tested in unprecedented times, has stood that test, and has really proven that what we're able to provide as a consequence of our partnership is something our customers can rely on. KEVIN HAUS: I'm Kevin Haus. I'm the VP of global alliances here at WorkForce Software. WorkForce Software is the leader in cloud-based time and attendance and workforce management solutions. When we looked at from a technology perspective, you know, we needed something that was able to really host our entire stack, be able to do this in a global format, and really provide the performance that our teams need to best serve the largest companies in the world.
We were seeing through some of our initial testing a 20% performance improvement, which we thought was like, that's awesome. So then we put you through a little bit more of the wringer, again and actually did some additional testing, and then through that even higher in depth, we actually even found that we could get up to about a 30% improvement. All of those evaluations and even many pilots go through, OCI was a clear cut winner of how we wanted to move our business and be able to go through. It was able to truly handle the scale of our business and to be able to handle it, to be able to go through, and be able to go into new markets.
It's not often does the team come back and consistently roll out ahead of schedule. So we started with APJ, and as we went through that entire timeline of how we went through, we actually were able to do it faster. The way we were able to do it was through the fantastic partnership with you guys and with Oracle. If it wasn't for that partnership with Oracle, we would not be able to beat the expectations of our senior management. Our board has been extremely impressed with how we've been able to continue to make the switch and to transition over to OCI, and from there, we were then looking at North America.
We were actually able to expedite the work that we were doing in North America and make that changeover. And initially, for in 2021, we were looking at making our changes second half of the year for our metadata center. We're actually moving all that up by about six months, as well, too because of just the overall performance improvements we're seeing and how well the teams are going, honestly, and how much additional savings that we're going to be able to really realize by making that change. We started this entire journey together back in January, so I can honestly say over the last year, it has blown us completely away.
It has been nothing less than top-notch of working together. The teams that have been assembled, from senior leadership all the way down, has been fantastic. The level of the teams being prepared, energetic, supportive, being able to drive all the different activities, it's fantastic.
It's been great. You can't really ask for anything more. One of the comments from our infrastructure teams was that they wish they would have started this journey sooner, so you know you're doing something right. And you guys definitely have a fantastic solution when you get the infrastructure guys extremely excited about why can't we go do this sooner.
I think the biggest things that when somebody else who is an ISV looking at making this journey and going through, there are the two big benefits. And that's one that you see as a company and for yourself, but then it's also what the value is to the customers and being able to tie in to the full Oracle applications and everything else and be able to drive additional value. Where you start, you can start simple, and you can start small about being able to just make that move over and get the initial benefits on it, which is fantastic. But don't lose sight on the bigger picture of you have so many more tools in your toolbox or candy in the candy store that you can go after and be able to really help and drive the value for your customers. DAVID HICKS: Hopefully, that was valuable, hearing directly from our partners themselves on the technical, the financial and commercial, and especially, the go to market benefits they've seen of partnering with Oracle and running on OCI.
Stay tuned now to hear a little bit more technically on OCI, and then we'll come back. And we'll follow up on how to engage with Oracle and start your cloud journey with us, as well. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] KARAN BATTA: Hi. My name is Karan Batta. I'm the VP of cloud engineering here at Oracle.
Today, I'm going to talk about what ISVs need to build large-scale services and how they're using Oracle to actually accomplish these goals. ISVs today are continually moving to the cloud for various reasons, such as driving down their IT costs or serving a growing global customer base. Even though ISVs are asking more of their cloud providers each and every day, there are still fundamental building blocks that are needed to build these large-scale SaaS services for their core business value. Firstly, ISVs have a global customer base. This means they require regional presence wherever those customers are located. Furthermore, some of these regional requirements may also mean multiple regions within the same country for things like DR or data sovereignty reasons.
This ISV customer base includes a wide variety of customers, such as local businesses to large enterprises and organizations, in different industries, like fintech, media, oil and gas, each with their own set of requirements, such as enterprise SLAs and security to attractive economics for cost-effective workloads, while maintaining consistent and predictable performance. I want to talk about these requirements and give you a quick glimpse of some of the things that we differentiate in this space. Firstly, our global footprint. We've invested heavily in our regional footprint based on customer feedback, and today, we are live with 29 regions, with an additional nine regions over the next 12 months.
We've been building these hyperscale regions on a very fast pace, and in every country we're located, we also have a second region for disaster recovery while meeting data sovereignty requirements, as well. And for customers that are invested in multiple cloud deployments, we've enabled these scenarios by partnering with Microsoft Azure for six interconnected regions. In addition, we've made it extremely simple by having consistent pricing across all of our regions globally.
This makes it extremely flexible and simple for ISVs to manage their costs, customers, and experience across a global footprint without having to load balance across multiple regions to optimize cost. As a large organization adopts ISV SaaS for their mission critical workloads, ISVs require more than just high availability from their cloud providers. Enterprise grade SLAs are critical in terms of setting quality of service standards, managing expectations, addressing liabilities and responsibilities, and providing a framework for handling and providing support during big outages. Oracle offers end to end SLAs that cover not just availability, but also performance SLAs, such as number of IOPS per disk or direct line rate of network bandwidth, and manageability, such as API failure rate. This allows for increased reliability for ISV applications running on Oracle Infrastructure, while providing consistent and expected results.
Cost is one of the more fundamental decision-making points for an ISV. The cost needs to be flexible and agile, with increasing value as the business of ISV grows. Most customers believe that cloud services are more expensive than running on prem data centers. However, most customers are also calculating these costs using the same buying patterns as they use on their premise data centers. With the right operational and architectural guidance, cloud can actually be more cost effective over time, and OCI is specifically leading in that charge with being the most cost effective across all cloud providers, not just on premise data centers.
And as you can tell from a small slice of services like networking and computing storage, OCI is significantly cheaper than the competition with similar, and in other cases better performance. You can check out a wide array of workload cost comparisons and benchmarks on our economics web page, and then to underscore the economics point, if you take a look at on-demand pricing across all the cloud providers, you'll see OCI is extremely cost effective in majority of the services, with some savings such as network bandwidth being orders of magnitude cheaper than the competition. You can also add to these savings with benefits, such as tiered pricing, to fully utilize Oracle Cloud's benefits.
Security is another core building block of how ISVs build SaaS products in the cloud. ISVs can expect to provide secure services to their customers, meaning that they expect cloud providers to actually give them the tools and the guidance and practices to build against threats, and in other cases, help them protect proactively against them. We've built OCI with a zero trust architecture from the ground up, from our bare metal compute instances that use technology such as off box virtualization, to our automated security patching for autonomous Linux and OS management, all the way to our fully managed services such as Cloud Guard that monitors your resources and activity and then uses machine learning to surface actionable issues and order remediate problems. Oracle has a complete suite of security products that redefines how ISV should think about security in the cloud. When ISVs and their customers bet on cloud, they expect at least some level of performance similar to on prem.
With the combination of superior economics and now superior performance, it makes Oracle a no brainer for ISVs looking to get the best of both worlds. We put our storage performance to the test. Not only has it been validated by third-party analysis, but our storage performance is backed by performance SLAs that I spoke about earlier, the only performance SLA in the industry.
StorageReview found that Oracle bare metal with attached block storage devices offers 2 to 5x better performance over AWS's I3 metal instances for Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL, BDI, and other types of mixed workloads. We offer over 5x more usable IOPS for Microsoft SQL server workloads than AWS. Now, this story extends to other aspects of OCI such as better price performance for our compute instances and the lowest latency already made network in the industry for HPC workloads, all the way down to 1.5 microseconds. Now, Oracle embraces a de facto standard for all of our cloud native services so that customers have a much lower overhead and costs for orchestration or cloud events, et cetera. Oracle works with partners like Microsoft and VMware to enable simpler migration, lower risk, and fully functional cross vendor applications.
You can run Oracle databases everywhere, but you can't run Aurora anywhere but AWS. Similarly, we've made open de facto decisions for things such as our Oracle Resource Management Provider, which is built on Terraform, so you can write code once and deploy everywhere. Hopefully, this gave you a quick view of some of the things that ISVs are doing across the board to enable large SaaS services for their customers.
You can get started very quickly by opening up a free account, and we provide what we call always free services, which is a host of services you can use to build an app and get experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Alongside, we provide credits so you can actually use them on paid services to get an experience of what it means to build an application or a SaaS service on the cloud. Thank you for your time today. [MUSIC PLAYING] DAVID PROFOZICH: Well, we've shared quite a bit with you today. Let me just summarize quickly what you've heard. First, we talked about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and how it's differentiated in the market, based on price performance, based on scale, based on security.
And we also shared our go to market model and how we partner with ISVs, SaaS partners like yourselves. Next, you heard from several of our most valuable SaaS partners, Altair, Korber, and WorkForce before Karan Batta followed that up with the technical synopsis of how an ISV-- how a SaaS player should think about OCI and how we differentiate to serve you. And to conclude, I would like to encourage all of you to visit our Virtual Resource Center, which you can find at cloudplatform.or acle.virtualresourcecenter.com, where you can enjoy the free tier of OCI right there from the center and a number of other resources we'd encourage you to take a look at.
Next, I'd like to encourage you to attend future cloud summits. Take a look at upcoming events on oracle.com/cloudplatform. We hope you'll rejoin us again. Let me just say this.
Thank you so much for your time today. It's been great being with you today, and we hope to meet many of you in the near future. Bye now.
2021-01-28 01:38
