Sunday, May 20, 2018

Oracle's No-Cost Platinum-Level Support Is the New Baseline in the Cloud Market

Companies may give up their servers, storage, and entire data centers when they move to the cloud, but their need for support services doesn’t go away, it changes. Recognizing a growing need for enterprise-class support in the cloud, Oracle is making its Platinum-level support services available at no additional cost to all customers of Oracle Fusion software-as-a-service applications.

“Our objective is to put out a service capability that is simply the best—bar none,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, in announcing that a range of support services would be available for Oracle Fusion enterprise resource planning, enterprise performance management, human capital management, supply chain, manufacturing, and sales and service cloud applications.

The SaaS support services include 24/7 rapid-response technical support, proactive technical monitoring, success planning, end-user adoption guidance, and education resources.

“Most of our customers are going to cloud,” Hurd said in a briefing with journalists at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. As that happens, he said, “it’s important for someone in the industry, particularly an industry leader in these mission-critical applications, to take a position” on what level of service that transition demands.

“SaaS application support offerings need to become more agile and responsive,” Hurd added. “We need to provide our SaaS customers with everything they need for rapid, low-cost implementations and a successful rollout to their users.”

Catherine Blackmore, Oracle group vice president of North America Customer Success, said Oracle will also offer new advanced services, including dedicated support and certified expertise, for customers that need a higher level of support. “We have a shared interest in our customers’ success, so we’re going above and beyond to ensure our customers have everything they need to succeed,” she said.

Cloud Levels the Playing Field

Oracle also announced the names of first-time cloud customers and others that are expanding their use of Oracle Cloud services. They include Alsea, Broadcom, Exelon, Gonzaga University, Heineken Urban Polo, Providence St. Joseph Health, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and T-Mobile US.

In a Q&A with the journalists, Hurd was asked about his outlook for SaaS adoption outside of the United States and, in particular, in the Latin America region. He said modern cloud applications can be “game changing” for businesses in places where outdated software applications are still the norm.

“You don’t need armies of experts and system integrators,” Hurd said.

Oracle develops thousands of features that are made available regularly to its SaaS application customers. “That’s a feature stream you don’t have to manage from a data center that you don’t have to operate,” Hurd said.

Self-Driving Technology

Hurd pointed to Oracle’s development of autonomous technologies, including the recently introduced Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service, as another big area of focus at the company. “It gets upgraded, optimized, secured, patched, and tuned, all automatically without any human intervention,” he said.

As the next step in the delivery of autonomous cloud services, Oracle announced the availability of three new Oracle Cloud Platform services with built-in artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms: Oracle Autonomous Analytics CloudOracle Autonomous Integration Cloud, and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud.



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