Why OCI for UCaaS: 7 Compelling Reasons

February 3, 2025 | 9 minute read
Raj Hindocha
Senior Cloud Architect
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In the previous blog post, Demystifying the World of Unified Communications as a Service, we explored the unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) industry, its product offerings, and the advantages that have driven its rapid growth in recent years. Now, let’s dive into why leading UCaaS companies are migrating their workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The success and satisfaction of our UCaaS customers on OCI can be attributed to the following key reasons.

Superior Price-Performance

When you host your UCaaS services on cloud, the top two items on your consumption bill every month are compute and networking. Virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal (BMs) based compute instances are important components of many applications, consumed either directly or as part of other cloud services, such as worker nodes for Kubernetes clusters. A recent comparison of the cost of running a 4-VCPU AMD-based Compute instance across different geographical regions showed OCI to be on average 50% cheaper than other cloud providers. You can achieve similar cost savings with Intel-based Compute instances.

Monthly virtual machine costs compared across shapes

UCaaS workloads are network intensive and involve sending vast quantities of data across the globe to customers, partners, branch offices, recovery sites, and other cloud providers. Unlike the exorbitant egress fees charged by other cloud providers, OCI charges zero egress fees for the first 10 TB every month and up to 10-times lower network charges.

OCI also doesn’t charge for data transfer within a cloud region (across cloud zones) or data sent on a dedicated private FastConnect link (unmetered) saving you significant amount for data egress costs. This configuration also allows you to architect in a cloud native fashion by spreading workloads across multiple availability zones for greater resiliency without worrying about a cost impact. The following graph shows a comparison of costs of moving data from a global cloud region to a US region across cloud providers. 

Comparing the cost of moving data across regions in OCI, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

OCI charges 50% less for compute, 70% less for block storage, and 80% less for network egress. OCI’s five-year TCO can be up to 45% lower than other cloud providers, providing long-term economic benefits. A global leader in remote working technology, GoTo Technologies moved its core video technology and other services to OCI and was able to cut infrastructure costs by an average of 50% with even higher savings for certain cloud services all, while improving performance for users and efficiently scaling with dynamic user load.

To learn more about the range of economic benefits of running on OCI, check out the OCI Cloud Economics page.

Flexible Infrastructure

OCI Compute allows you to match VM resources to your workloads. You can scale by a single CPU core, which is equivalent to two vCPUs in other clouds, and you can scale memory in 1 GB increments per core. You can right-size compute infrastructure to meet your performance requirements. Similarly, OCI provides flexible storage capacity and performance allowing you to scale up or down both parameters to pay for what you use.

Other clouds provide compute (and storage) in fixed sizes that typically double as they get bigger, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) m8g.24xlarge EC2 machine with 96 vCPU/384GB memory and next higher shape m8g.48xlarge with 192vCPU/768GB memory. Even if you need only a little more performance, you might have to double your compute size and cost to achieve it, which results in significant overspending.

The following graph shows the cost per hour of the latest AMD-based VMs at multiple sizes, from 2–96 vCPUs. All cloud providers have multiple sizes in the smaller range, but if you have a workload that needs 40 vCPUs, for example, you might have to purchase 48 vCPUs (AWS and  Azure) or 60 vCPUs (Google Cloud) to achieve the required performance.

Line graph comparing the cost per hour of AMD-based VMs at multiple sizes from multiple vendors

Per-hour virtual machine cost at multiple sizes

Having the flexibility to right-size compute infrastructure allows your costs to scale linearly rather than a step function. Flexibility paired with lower cost, helps businesses improve their bottom line. Sascha Kuemmel, vice president of Technology Strategy for GoTo Technologies states, “We were able to make use of Oracle’s flexible compute capabilities to match our workload needs precisely. Our workloads are very dynamic, due to the usage pattern of our customers. The reasonably priced on-demand model for compute in OCI is a perfect fit.”

Whether you’re looking for a Compute instance with higher vCPUs for telephony workloads or an instance with higher memory for encoding and caching workloads, OCI Flexible Compute infrastructure allows you to right-size compute instances for your needs.

Network Optimizations

Many enterprise applications are challenging to move to the cloud, as most hyperscale cloud providers were architected on a VM model with resources shared through the compute hypervisor and oversubscribed networks. This older architecture makes it difficult for enterprise applications to run at the expected levels of performance and availability without significant modification, which adds complexity and risk. UCaaS applications like server-based computing (SBC), session initiation protocol (SIP), audio, and video meeting services are performance sensitive. They were designed to run on scale-up architectures, ultra-low-latency networks, and persistent connections to relational databases. OCI’s Gen 2 cloud was designed to address the requirements of the most demanding enterprise applications. The following enhancements of OCI’s Gen 2 cloud enable UCaaS workloads to run seamlessly on our cloud platform:   

  • Flexible virtualization: OCI is the first cloud platform to implement flexible network virtualization, which takes network and IO virtualization (control plane operations) out of the hypervisor on the host and puts it in custom-designed smart network interface cards (NICs). This shift allows the hypervisor to focus on doing what it does best: virtualize CPU and memory and leave the network virtualization to Smart NIC. This setup reduces the overhead on the underlying host, giving the application complete access to server performance, increasing network performance and more importantly increasing security by isolating the hardware and software from the host.

Comparing first and second generation clouds

  • Nonblocking flat networks: The oversubscribed network and noisy neighbor problem became the biggest shortcomings of the Gen 1 cloud platform. OCI was able to overcome this problem by adopting the Clos network topology bringing each server to a distance of two hops with any other server in the data center. Clos topology eliminates the noisy neighbor traffic and provides clean, consistent network performance for each customer.
  • RDMA cluster networking: To provide ultra-low-latency networks to our customers, OCI followed its flagship database appliance Exadata and decided to use Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for its data center design. RDMA allows direct memory access from one computer to another without involving the operating system of either computer. This switch significantly reduces latency and improves throughput compared to traditional networking technologies.

These enhancements allow OCI to deliver the full power of a compute node to its customer’s applications, eliminate the noisy neighbor problem and deliver exceptional network performance, ensuring that UCaaS applications perform seamlessly. During the COVID pandemic when most businesses operated remotely, Zoom enabled millions of meetings daily using OCI, transferring upwards of seven petabytes (7*1015 bytes) through our servers each day, roughly the same capacity needed to stream HD video for 93 years.

Open Source Technology and Multicloud Support

With the shift towards cloud native technologies and developer operations (DevOps) methodologies, organizations are seeking an open, cloud-agnostic technology stack that avoids lock-in and allows them to run the same stack in any cloud or on-premises. OCI offers great tools for developers, supporting various programming languages and frameworks and has built services around open source technology. Our Kubernetes platform is built on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), our serverless compute platform, Functions, is built on the open source FN project, and we offer various open source database options, such as Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and more. Development teams are already familiar with the tooling available in OCI and can start development work immediately.

Sascha Kuemmel from GoTo Technologies said, “We were able to simply migrate our Kubernetes architecture to OCI without significant additional coding. OCI’s network and security design, and its native Terraform automation, allowed just two GoTo employees to bring up entire regions in less than 24 hours. Oracle team has been a great partner in closing any remaining gaps and making the platform a perfect fit for our requirements.”

An essential aspect of Oracle’s multicloud approach is its collaboration with leading cloud providers, such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). OCI provides a general-purpose interconnect solution with Azure and GCP, allowing you to run a split stack solution with ultra-low latency between any one of the other hyperscalers and OCI. OCI also extends its core database services across Azure, GCP and AWS, allowing you to use your existing cloud investments while still running on a trusted enterprise-grade cloud platform.

OCI is committed to creating a public cloud that embraces open source software (OSS) technologies and providing interoperable solutions that seamlessly integrate with other cloud providers. This commitment helps UCaaS customers run their multicloud strategy, minimize vendor risk, optimize cost, and most importantly integrate with their end customer applications wherever they are deployed.

Global Presence with Multiple Distributed Cloud Deployment Options

Despite being late to the cloud platform market, OCI today has a strong global presence, with 50 public cloud regions across 25 countries, nine Sovereign and Government cloud regions, and rapidly growing public cloud and multicloud regions. OCI supports the widest range of distributed cloud strategies, from portable devices on the edge to a complete built cloud (with all services) in a customer’s own data center. A distributed cloud model gives UCaaS providers the flexibility to deploy their services closer to their customers, helping ensure low latency and meeting regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, as noted by Gartner in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform services report.

In this video, Senior Vice President of Global Network and DevOps, Mehdi Salour highlights how OCI’s global presence and proximity to end users has helped 8x8 deliver highest quality experience with their audio, video and contact center solutions.

Consistent Pricing and Simpler Contracting Terms

OCI adopts the Universal Cloud Credits (UCC) model, where customers commit to spending a certain dollar amount annually, without tying them into using any specific SKU or services or regions. Customers are free to pick and choose any cloud service to run in any region and draw the consumption from their committed UCCs. OCI also has globally consistent pricing, making it easy for UCaaS providers to forecast their bottom line when entering in a new market and budgeting for their cloud expenses. In short, no more surprise bills. Finally, OCI is the only cloud provider that provides comprehensive service license agreements (SLAs), covering not just availability, but also performance, and API management.

Security and Compliance

Ensuring that your solutions remain available and keeping your customer’s data safe is an increasingly complicated challenge. Cloud providers like OCI provide standardized security and compliance tools out of the gate. With OCI, the most critical components for security, such as vaults and vulnerability scanning, are included with most key services at no charge. Security is foundational to our cloud platform and not bolted on as an afterthought.

Furthermore, Oracle helps customers achieve compliance per national, provincial, and local regulations. Our government customers don’t pay extra for protections that are built-in to the platform. Finally, with vast number of OCI regions, you can host your customer data locally within the geographic borders which helps data sovereignty requirements.

Conclusion

OCI has created a differentiated cloud platform that has benefitted many UCaaS customers like Zoom, 8x8 and GoTo Technologies. Customers can innovate and achieve significant cost-savings by migrating their most demanding workloads to OCI. For more insights how OCI has developed a differentiated cloud and how big enterprise companies are benefitting from their adoption of OCI, read Oracle Cloud Has Achieved Momentum Through Differentiation from Forbes or further explore Oracle’s unique value proposition. if you’re thinking about hosting your services on OCI or seeking to benefit from OCI’s unique advantages, contact Raj Hindocha.

Take the next steps and open your own free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account and explore what we offer.

Raj Hindocha

Senior Cloud Architect

Senior Cloud Architect helping customers in their journey to cloud


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