In October 2022 Oracle announced a new cloud offering called “Oracle Alloy”. According to Oracle’s announcement, Alloy will allow almost anyone to be a cloud provider. Companies may white-label Alloy and brand it as their own. They can also wrap additional services around it to add additional revenue. If, for example, you are a large telecommunications firm, you can now offer “your cloud” services to your client. Your clients will work with you, and you in turn will work with Oracle Cloud (OCI).
One reason Oracle released Alloy is for companies and countries that must keep data in-country. Oracle will allow data to be anywhere you put Alloy, whereas OCI might not have a datacenter located in the country, region, or facility required. It’s actually a good move by Oracle to address one of the biggest concerns with cloud, particularly as countries tighten up their data sovereignty requirements.
What does this mean for you?
So what is Oracle Alloy? Digging a little deeper, you can think of Oracle Alloy as OCI for partners. Meaning, instead of you hosting your data on OCI for your own internal business operations, you as the Oracle partner can lease some space on Alloy and then resell Oracle cloud services to your clients, wrapping your applications or other industry specific insight around your offerings.
So if you have an application you want to put on the cloud, you can put it on Alloy, add your expertise and dozens of Oracle cloud services/options to your offering, and then resell that to your customers. Just as Oracle allows companies to package the Oracle database into their solutions, Oracle now allows companies to package Oracle Alloy/cloud.
Is Oracle Alloy worth the investment?
If it is worth the investment, it’s to a very niche market. First, you have to be willing to trust Oracle’s practices and policies. Can you imagine getting into a dispute with Oracle over licensing/costs and Oracle has the ability to shut off your business? We have not seen that happen, yet, but it is not out of the question given Oracle’s position against customers and partners in other areas.
Second, the technical underpinning of Alloy (aka, OCI) must be sufficient to run your business. Most companies moving to cloud are picking Google, MSFT, and/or AWS. Most are not standardizing on Oracle’s cloud. It’s been 2 years since their Alloy announcement and we have not witnessed any significant change in customer sentiment.
If you are considering Alloy, reach out to Palisade Compliance. We will help to ensure you are getting something that works for your company and keeps you in control of Oracle.
