Many companies, including software developers, system integrators, and telecom carriers, would like to offer tailored cloud services to their customers—including those in highly regulated industries. But the cost and complexity of building a cloud services platform from scratch have been too high. Until now.
At Oracle CloudWorld 2022, Oracle introduced Oracle Alloy, a comprehensive cloud infrastructure platform that gives organizations everything they need to become cloud service providers.
“The reason we call it Alloy is that it’s all about bringing the best that we have to offer at Oracle and combining it with the best that our localized operators and partners have,” says Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). “Together, we actually have a cloud that has more strength than either of the two individually.”
Much like Shopify has done with the democratization of online retail, Oracle Alloy lets organizations provide their customers with a full suite of cloud services. They can put their own brand on the same 100-plus infrastructure and platform services available in the OCI public cloud, and package additional services and applications to meet the very specific needs of their industries. Oracle Alloy also provides all the back-end tools needed to offer a cloud service, such as billing and invoicing.
“We believe that there’s a new role of a cloud operator that can intermediate between the cloud provider and consumers,” Magouyrk says. “This is not true for all workloads. It’s not true for all use cases. But this is an unmet gap in the market.”
Demand grows for customized clouds
Amid ongoing regulatory changes worldwide, there’s increasing demand for applications and services tailored to the unique needs of local governments and companies. In addition, Oracle’s partners often want more control over cloud services than the traditional public cloud can offer.
“One of the fundamental tradeoffs when you go to the public cloud is control,” Magouyrk says. “For those customers that need complete infrastructure control, we created Oracle Alloy.”
Oracle Alloy provides those companies with OCI’s native tools to quickly build cloud-based, bespoke services and generate new revenue streams without large up-front engineering efforts or capital investments. Partners can customize how they brand Oracle Alloy, set their own prices, and set their own support structure and service levels. There is no comparable offering like it in the cloud infrastructure market, given the number and breadth of services Oracle Alloy provides, Magouyrk says.
“We’re giving you the exact same set of tools and platforms that we use to build OCI services today,” he says. “The net result is that you can build services and functionality with your differentiated IP that sit alongside the cloud. We also heard from customers that they have unique hardware needs and that they need to add that functionality to the cloud platform. We’ve achieved this by having a very flexible, virtualized networking infrastructure that allows you to plug in hardware, and you can have customized services for managing the lifecycle and deployment of that same hardware.”
The fact that partners manage Oracle Alloy services in their own data centers will appeal to organizations in highly regulated industries, those with data residency and national security concerns—and those that just prefer to maintain control of their cloud services. Partners have full authority over the physical facilities, staffing, customer support, and access to systems and customer information, as well as patching and upgrades. “Localized control always requires localized operators,” Magouyrk says.
Oracle will offer partner teams onboarding, training, and certification on how to run, manage, and operate Oracle Alloy. Partners can also take advantage of Oracle technical and escalation support for help with complex customer and service ops issues.