Matt Ryan

Apr. 29,2021 | Oracle, Cloud, Amazon, AWS, CCO

While recent articles proclaim Oracle is ‘Turning into a Cloud Giant’ and why their stock is should be considered a ‘buy’ (Barron’s, Feb 19^th, 2021) – we say, “really?” While NET(net) does not pretend to be in the stock price benchmarking business, we can say based on experience that if Oracle is indeed becoming a ‘Cloud Giant’, then it’s probably bad for their customers. Historically, Oracle has grown new lines of business by pressuring customers into purchases they really don’t want or quite yet need but are left with few choices lest they become another audit victim.

Consistent with that strategy, Oracle has thrown up some daunting roadblocks for customers attempting to move their Oracle workloads to the public cloud. Clever combinations of licensing rule confusion via ‘Oracle Cloud Policy’ (their stated policy of using Oracle workloads in AWS or Azure) and making competitor offerings less attractive by undercutting as much as 50% for their own products, gives pause to many enterprises. But with the right strategy, planning, and approach – migrating your Oracle workloads to AWS or Azure will yield a more optimized solution with a lower TCO.

Three Focus Areas of Oracle Workload Migration Costs

The levels of complexity in how Oracle licenses their products for use outside their own Cloud are numerous and deep. As introduced above, Oracle has separate rules for moving to AWS as they do for staying on Oracle, and those rules are further complicated by license types: Name User Plus and Processer based. Each one of these types of licenses have their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the environment. Now add Oracle’s Cloud Licensing policies on top of that, and you have a web of options to untangle.

2: Compute Costs

Understanding your consumption costs when considering Oracle versus AWS/Azure Cloud has some large considerations as well. There are discounts based on usage and term of agreements, as well as the instance types (reserved, on demand, etc.).

Another major component in any pricing exercise when considering a move to migrate your on-premises workloads to Oracle’s Cloud are the associated refactoring (additional deployed cores) costs. When utilizing VMware Cloud on AWS, there will be potential cost savings realized, but not necessarily with Oracle Cloud. Deep understanding and planning need to be undertaken to ensure all costs are vetted and considered around potential refactoring implications, which can add substantially to the investment.

The Size of the Workloads Matter

When analyzing the actual cost of migrating your workloads to AWS, size does matter, as the price for staying with Oracle climbs as the size of the workloads do. Only when looking at very small workloads does it make sense to stay on the Oracle Cloud. Anything beyond that, and the metrics for using AWS get better and more efficient.

To summarize, you DO have options. As with anything related to Oracle however, there must be a tremendous amount of pre-work done in preparation, along with a deep understanding of how Oracle licensing works on multiple levels. In short, you should work with experts who do this on a regular basis, and candidly know Oracle better than they know themselves.

Engaging Oracle licensing and Cloud professionals to at least review your plans, if not put them together with you, is needed to fully guard against making small mistakes that have cost other Oracle customers millions.

Contact us today to have a no strings attached conversation with one of our Oracle professionals.

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