Oracle has announced a timely reminder that SMB’s do interact successfully with them despite many observers commenting during the NetSuite deal that they don’t. Those commentators included ourselves and Oracle has reminded observers about the three tiers of cloud that Ellison talked about during his keynote at Oracle World.
Oracle is keen to point out that its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) is available and used by SMBs. SMB’s are able to deploy solutions and applications across the Oracle cloud, leveraging the tools such as powerful databases to provide solutions to their clients.
MCH Strategic Data leverages Oracle PaaS
MCH Strategic data is a small 100 strong company based in Sweet Springs, Missouri. They specialise in providing B2B leads for industry sectors such as healthcare, education, religion, government and others. To do this they turned to Oracle database services to provide a platform that could cope with the larger data sets they would need. Using the Oracle Database Cloud Service they transitioned from a legacy data vendor. The process to complete the environment took minutes with very little in the way of upfront costs. The press release does not say how long or how much data they imported though.
Brian Vogelsmeier, director of IT, MCH Strategic Data commented: “The power of data in the Cloud is in the ability to rapidly leverage it for business insights that drive our customers’ success. As collecting data is paramount to our business, we needed to pick a vendor that has best-in-class database Cloud technology that makes the back up to the database seamless, hence our choice to leverage Oracle’s services.”
Pragmatic migration for Pragmatyxs
Pragmatyxs has built a successful business over the last twenty years. They are now a leader in the application of AIDC technologies in compliance labeling. Pragmatyxs help clients to maintain and increase success through implementation of accurate product labeling, bar coding and other tracking solutions. An Oracle client for some time, they knew that moving from on-premises to a cloud based solution would deliver significant benefits.
While they may have chosen an alternate cloud provider they turned to Oracle to deliver the PaaS and IaaS solutions they required. Oracle delivered on the efficiency, security and also enabled true 24/7 availability. The challenge for small companies is that while IT teams may be on call 24×7 there is often a time delay in both reaction and resolution to any out of hours issues. Oracle provide a true 24×7 cover where engineers or not just always available they are actually working.
Paul Van Hout, CEO and Founder, Pragmatyxs commented: “We launched our Cloud based label printing service for our partners and remote facilities which was a strategic initiative for our business. We have 15 employees, so we needed a solution that was the most efficient and secure with 24/7 availability.
“By using Oracle Database Cloud Service, PaaS and IaaS. Pragmatyxs utilizes Oracle’s Database Cloud Service, Java Cloud Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Messaging and Cloud Service. We are maximizing the efficiency promised by the Cloud while giving our customers a better, more configurable product. With Oracle, we can stay ahead of the industry and compete like we never could before.”
ERP solution chooses Oracle
No, the example used by Oracle in the press release was not NetSuite. Realistically one could not really classify NetSuite as an SMB with 5,000 employees. Since Oracle completed the acquisition it is now even larger as part of the Oracle family. It should not be forgotten though that NetSuite’s target market is SMB, although they have recently climbed up above that sector as well. Instead Oracle chose to use IQMS as an example.
IQMS are using Oracle more and more
IQMS offer an ERP solution for manufacturers and other markets. They were included by Gartner in the Market Guide for Manufacturing Execution System Software (Registration/Payment required) recently. Founded in 1989 the software was initially developed as an on-premises solution. Realising that the business world, including manufacturing, was increasingly turning to the cloud they looked to Oracle to provide a solutions. They are increasingly using Oracle solutions as they move their solutions to the cloud, while still supporting their customers who have retained on-premises solutions.
They have extended the on-premises solutions with Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service. This allows customers to analyse and visualise the extensive IoT data that IQMS collects through on-premises factory floor machines. As IQMS solutions run on the Oracle database they are now offering Oracle cloud backup. This delivers piece of mind to customers with legacy solutions that in a worst case scenario they can restore the complete system solution.
Gary Nemmers, CEO and President, IQMS commented: “For its reliability, price point, and strong security, the real value of Oracle Cloud Platform is being able to offer customers more services along with added simplicity. If any component fails, factories stop and that can’t happen. With Oracle Cloud Platform, our customers have benefits like more extensive data encryption than they run in house and some are have even freed up resources previously tied up with on-premises datacenter maintenance.
“We are proud to be helping businesses of all sizes build, grow and compete in the Cloud,” said Ashish Mohindroo, Vice President, Oracle Cloud. “With a single, connected cloud, Oracle offers SMBs more than just subscription software. We are proud to be a strategic partner to help explain how all of the pieces of our cloud work together to help solve business challenges—by helping SMBs build innovative applications and solutions for sales, marketing, finance and reporting, to talent and recruitment drives.”
Making it easier to purchase?
Oracle has also realised that the time to buy for SMB’s is quick. Far faster than the procurement decision making process that larger organisations implement. Oracle has therefore improved the buying experience for cloud.
They created the accelerated buying experience so that purchases can be complete in “hours or days”, rather than “weeks”. One suspects that some companies will expect those timescales to come down even further. This is because most SMB’s expect decisions to be made and implemented in minutes, rather than hours.
Conclusion
While Oracle do offer several solutions that are available to SMB’s, one suspects that they have had mixed success. Their services include data management, application development environments, integration services and application and cloud management. It would be interesting to see Oracle demonstrating exactly how SMB’s can leverage these solutions. They need to do more work to convince the SMB market that they are comparable to other solutions specifically targeted at that market.
Perhaps Oracle have a lot to learn from NetSuite when the two companies join up. One would hope that expertise is not lost with the acquisition.
