Delivering ongoing innovation and superior experiences with Oracle Alloy

At last year’s Oracle CloudWorld, many of our new OCI product and service announcements brought a lot of enthusiasm, among cloud customers and critics alike. This fact is especially true for Oracle Alloy, an entirely new dedicated cloud product. This unique OCI product is designed to empower our customers and partners, Alloy Operators, to effectively serve their customers by becoming the cloud providers for a region or industry, easily packaging, and offering over 100 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services as any Oracle Cloud region with their existing service offerings.  

Oracle Alloy

With Oracle Alloy, its operators can provide a full set of cloud services with branded and tailored user experiences and package more value-added cloud services and applications that meet the needs of a market or an industry vertical. An Oracle Alloy Operator retains full control of the data and applications to meet the most stringent security, regulatory, and data residency requirements. Similar to OCI Dedicated Region, Oracle Alloy functions as a full cloud region that Oracle supports and provides new features updates as they become available in other Oracle public cloud regions for continued innovation.

Since the initial Oracle Alloy announcement, OCI product and engineering teams have been hard at work to deliver on the promise, achieving impressive milestones as our Alloy operating partners in Europe and Asia gear up to go to market with exponentially expanded cloud services portfolios. Oracle Alloy is more than just cloud services running in an Alloy Operator location or a dedicated cloud region install. It’s effectively a whole OCI region that the customer or partner operating team can independently manage, maintain, and enhance, assisted by Oracle’s upgrades and support.

Oracle Alloy provides modules packed with capabilities to manage a complete customer life cycle, including onboarding, invoicing, customizing the console experience, and more. We’re excited to share the following key capabilities with you today.

Creating branded experiences

One of the main differentiators for Oracle Alloy is the flexibility to customize and rebrand to Alloy Operator’s brand standards. This not only reinforces Alloy operating team to further establish their brand but also helps provide a superior and simplified customer experience. With the UX and Branding module, the Alloy operating teams can customize the main console with their logo and preferred color palette applied to the header, footer, navigation menu, background, accents, and link colors. All brand updates are made in a single operator console UI and reflected across all internal and end customer-facing areas, such as the operator console and service health dashboards, end-user onboarding interface, system-generated email, announcements, including end customer facing documentation.

Managing the end-to-end customer lifecycle 

The commercial system module delivers a robust end-to-end customer life-cycle management capability with foundational pricing, billing, and subscription services built on native OCI services, all unpinned by award winning Oracle Fusion Applications for seamless management. You can manage and operate all services in the commercial system through the same console as the UX and branding module.   

Within the pricing foundation service, Alloy Operators can create the product offerings and packages, curate their pricelist with customizable rate cards at subscription levels, and set other pricing rules. While the billing foundation services allow Alloy Operators to create and implement a billing pipeline, set billing schedules, and create related documentation, the subscription management service helps Alloy Operators to easily create a subscription, assign a service period, associate it to a UCM billing model and a customized rate-card. Alloy Operators can utilize public APIs to query the subscription information to the console and modify it within the subscription service.

One of the guiding principles behind the Alloy commercial system module is simplicity. Whether through the simple single UI used to manage all subscriptions in one place or the single instance integration between the operator’s order management system to the back-office system, it’s all about seamless customer lifecycle management.

Driving business decisions and growth with insights

The Business Operator module is Alloy's business reporting tool that provides consolidated, real-time information the Alloy operator can use for planning and decision-making. Alloy's business reporting provides a dashboard with metrics to monitor customer adoption, revenue growth, and insights into operational health. Alloy's business reporting service capabilities leverage Oracle's internal platform, Horizon - a powerful combination of a central data lake and analytics platform. The system can ingest data from over thousands of active datasets and external partner services. Horizon provides a unique platform to host unified, business-critical dashboards such as product adoption, executive reporting, and CASE metrics.

The Business Operator module provides business insights through multi-dimensional dashboards organized around four areas: revenue metrics, service consumption, order and provisioning, and customer support metrics. While the revenue (P&L) dashboard reports the number of customers and their consumption patterns and trends, the service consumption dashboard provides insights into native units of consumption of a service and customer adoption. The order and provisioning dashboard tracks the customer orders and provisioning status, and the customer support dashboard monitors service request status and trends, filterable by severity, status, and channel.

Innovation without compromise

Apart from the user-based modules, the OCI product and engineering teams have also been busy defining and optimizing back-office operational and support systems for a typical Alloy deployment. This is a huge undertaking. Similar to any OCI public cloud region, an Alloy install must be built to serve thousands of enterprises and millions of end users concurrently.

The ability to deliver a complete cloud region as an out-of-box product into a customer/partner-controlled environment, differentiates Oracle from other hyperscalers. OCI services are engineered using standardized tools and processes, built to accommodate scale, and meet rigorous global compliance and security bar. This approach means that every OCI service is designed to be available in any region, and each region is designed to be operated independently and in a 'self-contained' manner.

OCI services are engineered using standardized tools and processes, built to accommodate scale, and meet a high compliance and security bar. The differentiated approach is built upon years of experience of continuously working on keeping Oracle public cloud secure, working on solutions for organizations such as government and defense agencies that demand higher regulatory standards enabling us to bring the entire cloud platform into a customer/partner-controlled environment.

“Our core mission is co-creating value and growth with our customers, solve their toughest business challenge by facilitating latest solutions, cloud technology and innovation. OCI Dedicated Region have enabled us to secure key NRI SaaS applications” said Hiroto Kawamura, General Manager, Nomura Research Institute.  “Addition of Oracle Alloy enables us to build an integrated system with advanced cloud operation closely linked with public cloud, improve our organizations’ agility to respond to customers' business model changes, and ability expand our service portfolio to offer new generation public cloud capabilities that are pivotal to cloud advancement and business acceleration for both, NRI and our customers.”

Want to know more?

To learn more about Oracle Alloy, visit Oracle Alloy.