At its CloudWorld conference, Oracle on October 18 said that it would be launching a new offering, dubbed Oracle Alloy, that will allow independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), and other partner organizations to resell its cloud services.
The new private label cloud offering is based on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle’s cloud stack that provides cloud compute, storage, and networking services, said Karan Batta, vice president for product management, Oracle.
“Alloy provides our partners with the ability to take our OCI IP and be able to brand it and run it as their own cloud. Partners can offer it to their end customers, as a as an infrastructure provider,” Batta explained.
Oracle said that users of Alloy can offer a branded, tailored experience, and package value-added applications and services to meet specific needs of their industry verticals and markets. Alloy can be used within an organization’s own data centers and to serve the public sector and other industries that want to keep workloads in country.
The company is offering Oracle Fusion Cloud as part of the offering so that partners can invoice bills and manage the lifecycle of their customers.
Oracle expects each of the partner agreements to be different, Batta said, adding that they were working with partners such as Accenture to shape the product though partner organizations can sign up to buy the new offering. “Every commercial agreement is going to be slightly different but essentially, it's going to be a commitment model, similar to what a dedicated region is today.”
Alloy provides the same infrastructure and platform services available in the OCI public cloud. As a result, partners can go to market with a pre-integrated hardware and software platform deployed in their own data centers.
Oracle Alloy is being rolled out concurrently with several services pertaining to OCI app development, serverless and container messaging services, and simpler adoption of cloud-native technologies. The services, now in limited availability, include:
- A Virtual Nodes capability for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) and Container Instances provides serverless compute options for running container-based apps in the cloud, without having to manage servers. OKE users can build Kubernetes clusters that use Virtual Nodes for serverless operation. Container Instances, for cloud-based containers not requiring orchestration, allows for quickly launching containers with a single CLI command or a guided console experience.
- OCI Queue provides serverless messaging for distributed microservices architectures. Asynchronous communications is enabled for decoupling of services, so they can scale independently and handle spikes in demand.
- OCI Workflow is a serverless workflow engine with a graphical flow designer enabling developers to accelerate development of application logic, automated IT tasks, and data processing jobs. Orchestration of OCI services is supported for OCI Functions and AI/ML.
The new offering will have positive impact on all parties involved, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst, Constellation Research.
“OEM strategies are smart for software vendors as they can use the same research and development cost to reach more customers. This is valid for cloud infrastructure as well, and Oracle is the first major cloud vendor to go this route,” Mueller added.
The positive for the last mile customer enterprise is that they can keep their relationship with their trusted service provider or vendor (Alloy partner), the principal analyst said.