Exclusive Interview with Siddharth Idnani - Alliance & Channels, Oracle

Oracle has announced Oracle Cloud Alloy, a new cloud infrastructure platform at Oracle Cloud World which happened in Las Vegas a few weeks back. In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Siddharth Idnani - Alliance & Channels, Oracle India talked about Cloud Alloy, its key benefits to the Indian market, and Oracle’s focus on accelerating cloud in India with partners.

In the context of the announcement of Cloud Alloy, what are the GTM strategies for Partners and Indian Market?

Cloud Alloy is relevant for the Indian market because a lot of the large IT companies that are global system integrators and data center providers are all our partners and want to offer customers the option of multi-cloud services. This platform allows them to do that in addition to their own offerings of data centers, if a customer wants a set of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, they can sort of put it all together and position it in the way they want with customers. It allows them the full suite of Oracle Cloud services, but it allows them to have flexibility in terms of commercial terms, in terms of billing terms, and in terms of being able to mix and merge it with their existing infrastructure and offerings to those customers.

How Oracle is educating its partner about Cloud Alloy?

Our existing partners are already familiar with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and are either signed up for one of our Oracle partner network tracks. We are attempting to reach out to some of these larger partners that have aspirations to become global or large-scale cloud service providers. This is a very customized offering with the needs of each partner, the sizing scale and scope can be really tuned to how a partner wants to take it to market. It is not a bouquet or fixed price fixed scope kind of offering. And therefore it will be very unique conversations with each partner.

Our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers cloud university programs, which onboard and train, and certify partners to provide and run manage the new solutions that Oracle brings into the market right. Similar is going to happen in the case of Oracle Alloy. They will be included in the Training and documentation, the process will be done to provide the first line of technical and account support that they will need to give to the customers.

What are the key benefits to the Indian market, especially for the partners when we talk about Cloud Alloy?

There is a tremendous opportunity for partners to grow their businesses by offering their customers the performance of the public cloud, which is what this will allow them to offer. Therefore, it opens up new opportunities. Partners will gain this is that they have much more control while they are getting the full suite of Oracle Cloud services. They have full control over what a public cloud service offering can offer. They can have their own billing terms, they can support unique clients in different industries, and they can tailor the service to a particular set of customers, which they may not be able to do with a public cloud offering another advantage that is also envisaged, and there are many but I will just finish with this one is that Partners can also pre integrate this Alloy platform with other hardware and software platforms deployed in their own data centers.

On the end customer side, the main benefit is that end customers want cloud environments that are close to them. It could be for reasons of data residency or data sovereignty or it could just be that they want to work with familiar service providers who they've been doing business with in the past. the combination of these things allows end customers to do is take advantage of the public cloud offering, which is what they would get with this offering, but also works with an existing partner who is able to customize it, run it out of the partner’s own data center, and feel completely comfortable and flexible about that.

How Oracle is helping traditional partners and end customers who are adopting new technologies?

We have a wide variety of certification programs for both partners, end customers, administrators, and operators. Because the cloud is fairly simple to use but customers and partners need to keep abreast and keep upgrading their knowledge. Depending on the depth required, depending on the level of expertise required, there are various programs that are available to customers and partners to enable themselves, specifically for partners. We also give them free credits and vouchers to continuously enhance their skills so that they are able to better service customer environments.

What are the key industries that will benefit from this Cloud Alloy platform?

This applies to all sectors but the ones where we believe it will see the most traction are a lot of public sectors because there is a need to keep workloads within the country. Within the customer’s or particular partner’s premises and they have this need being a regulated industry to operate tightly managed setups. We believe in sectors such as banking and finance, where Oracle has a very strong presence, and most of the banks and the insurance companies, nonbanking, and financial companies. We are also keen to see the opportunity for healthcare and telecommunications. Those are some sectors that I would like to call out. But you know it cuts across pretty much everything.