It might seem strange to start an article on a technology blog by talking about food, but the analogy facilitates the explanation of one of the most innovative and interesting service delivery models seen in the market.

In 2021, we started an effort at Oracle Consulting in Brazil to simplify and make Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) migration services more efficient and adaptable. Before this effort, customization was the keyword. In our food analogy, the service delivery model focused on fine dining, with deliveries prepared to measure for each client. At that time, it made sense to be that way because the environments and platforms that supported applications and databases varied widely.

However, when it comes to cloud computing, this scenario changes with increased standardization to ensure interoperability and portability between different cloud providers and systems. In this scenario, a standardized and fast service model gains relevance. You might not like fast, standardized food where you can hardly change the ingredients, but as a business model and food delivery, fast food provides speed, efficiency, high volume of delivery, and standardization of activities generating less chance of error and reliability.

In the end, the choice between fast food or fine dining depends on what you’re looking for. If you want a quick and affordable meal, fast food is the right choice. But if you’re looking for an exclusive and sophisticated experience, fine dining is the best option.

Now that you’re an expert in food delivery models, let's go back to information technology. Oracle offers its clients two types of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) migration services: Oracle Cloud Lift Services and Oracle Consulting paid services.

Oracle Consulting paid services

Oracle Consulting paid services is the traditional model for service delivery considering more customized solutions, more critical environments, and with a high impact on the business. In this case, the main characteristic is the customization of activities, including technical and contextual understanding of needs, requirement gathering, environment specificities, and understanding of constraints, including deadlines with limited dates, short maintenance windows (a few hours), and migration complexity.

In the Oracle Cloud Lift Services model, most migrations of production environments are as-is, meaning that the versions and configurations are the same in the source (any other cloud or physical server) and in the destination (OCI). For Oracle Consulting paid services, the workloads to be migrated can be adjusted, updated, customized, and transformed to maximize performance on OCI. This adjustment demands more effort, which doesn’t necessarily translate into time because activities are parallelized whenever possible with the addition of more technicians or tools.

Another characteristic of traditional consulting is the seniority level of the technicians, which is usually higher to meet the specific demands of each environment because the variations between the source and destination environments are naturally greater, preventing deliveries with predefined scope (service packages) from being used.

Oracle Cloud Lift Services

We developed Oracle Cloud Lift Services to deliver speed and efficiency in the face of high demand for standardized migrations. Using processes, methods, and specialized consultants to create consistency and ensure high delivery quality, this service is available at no cost to all current or new customers who use OCI. Hundreds of clients in Latin America have already migrated their workloads from various source environments—on-premises, physical servers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google—to OCI using Oracle Cloud Lift Services.

To establish a high delivery standard, both in quality and customer experience, we had to create a system to manage and monitor dozens, if not hundreds, of simultaneous migrations for the most diverse types of clients and industries that you can imagine. Whether large telecommunications (telcos) providers, startups, huge retail networks or even large financial corporations, the model applies to any type of client.

Oracle developed the application used to control and ensure that deliveries are completed on time, with quality and within the requested scope. Known as CONQUEST, it utilizes Oracle APEX technology and its main function was built based on queueing theory, which is a branch of mathematics that studies the formation and behavior of queues to size a system's capacity to satisfy customers and be economically viable for the service provider by avoiding waste and bottlenecks. This theory maximizes resource utilization for better service and always seeks the highest possible efficiency, speed, volume, and quality.

The scope of services is assembled in a modular way, adding various service packages until all the necessary activities to migrate the entire workload are achieved. For Oracle Cloud Lift Services, the packages include databases, virtual machines (VMs), network, applications, and so on. Here, CONQUEST acts again because all service packages are registered in the system, so that they can be aggregated into a service offering with all the scope and effort already calculated.

Through queueing theory, CONQUEST manages customer demand, combined with the efforts needed to make deliveries, controlling and predicting the delivery capacity of our migration factory. This control makes it possible to correctly size the number of people and type of knowledge and skill required for those deliveries or service offerings.

Tools to help you succeed

Making a hamburger and migrating a database are completely different things, but you can do both consistently if you have a step-by-step guide detailing the processes and methods to use. Oracle Cloud Lift Services has a set of procedural guides called runbooks for all service packages available. Runbooks ensure that the deployment of a migration performed for a customer in Brazil follows the same steps as another migration for a customer in Colombia or anywhere else in the world.

Oracle Cloud Lift Services is the ideal service model for migrations of lesser complexity and in less critical environments. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use the service for migrations in production environments, but the scope of these case has limits. As Oracle Cloud Lift Services adds automation for migrations, the complexity of today might be simple tomorrow. Then, new capabilities are incorporated into the system, expanding the range of services both in types of technologies and in processing complexity.

The proof of the success of this service model is the high level of customer satisfaction. For all migrations, we use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) evaluation, which is a survey that considers quantitative and qualitative data to assess how satisfied customers are with the experience they have with our services. For Oracle Cloud Lift Services in Latin America, this satisfaction rate reaches 80%, meaning that 8 out of 10 customers consider the service a 9 or 10 on a scale of 10 points.

The crucial issue in this service model is the importance of maintaining a range of options with a well-defined scope. We can’t make custom deliveries or deliveries outside the available options or risk weakening and degrading the efficiency of the migration factory, decreasing volume, making the process slower, and affecting delivery quality. It's like going to a fast food restaurant and ordering fine dining food or changing all the ingredients in your order.

A more personalized experience

Many companies have highly skilled personnel who can utilize their own methods to perform migrations, while using tools to automate and expedite this journey. At Oracle, we can highlight Oracle Cloud Migrations, Zero Downtime Migration, GoldenGate, and many others. Many market-enabled tools for migrating workloads to OCI are also available, such as Rackware, Matilda Cloud, Veeam, WANDisco, and others.

Conclusion

Whether it's Oracle Cloud Lift Services or Oracle Consulting paid services, Oracle offers migration services for customers with workloads of varying levels of complexity. The best part is that you can integrate a combination of the two models, where some services come at no cost through Oracle Cloud Lift Services and the other part comes through paid contracts for customized consulting.

Our top priority is to ensure that your journey to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the best it can be, like grabbing an amazing burger and fries with friends after a night out or treating yourself to a fancy dinner with someone special.

For more information, see the following resources:

• Oracle Cloud Lift Services
• Oracle Consulting