Oracle Puts Cloud to Work for New Services Offering
While Oracle has been talking up its cloud plans, most of the discussion has centered around how it will help enterprises move IT assets such as applications and infrastructure to the cloud. Oracle’s Advanced Customer Support organization is leveraging the cloud to introduce Platinum Services, a solution that bundles 24/7 fault monitoring, quarterly patches and system updates, and predictive services that aim to prevent problems before they arise.
Platinum Services will be free of charge for Oracle customers using certain of the company’s engineered systems: Exadata X2-2 and X2-8, Oracle Exalogic X2-2 and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 Servers with Exadata storage, Sun ZFS Storage or Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 Storage.
“We figured out how to extend the cloud to heterogenous systems at customer sites to deliver real-time service to them,” said Larry Abramson, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Advance Customer Support Services.
To access Oracle Platinum Services, customers will install a patented, secure monitoring gateway. This approach is possible with Oracle’s pre-integrated systems, Abramson said, because “we own every component in the stack and the systems are engineered to work together with standard configurations.”
In addition to fault monitoring, quarterly patches/updates and predictive services, Abramson said Platinum Services also includes “some pretty aggressive SLAs,” including a five-minute response time for Severity 1 issues and a 15-minute restoration or escalation to development for Severity 1 issues.
Oracle is positioning Platinum Services as a bridge between traditional IT support and fully-managed services that will lower customer costs, ease system administration and improve uptime and reliability. Customers are especially keen for solutions that encompass management and monitoring along with support, Abramson said.
“Putting our technology at customer sites enables us to get ahead of issues and help customers with these systems prevent issues from ever occurring,” he said. “Customers don’t differentiate between systems we monitor and systems we don’t. They expect us to be able to provide support right down to the component level, instantaneously.”
Customers will also see long-term service improvements with the “closed loop” approach facilitated by Oracle’s engineered systems, Abramson said. “We learn from the customer’s environment. Our knowledge base is updated, and that’s reflected in product improvements, security patches and the quarterly updates.”
Platinum Services also incorporates a feature called “fingerprinting,” in which customers’ error conditions are “enriched” with information about similar errors dealt with by Oracle experts. Thus, errors are “filtered, qualified and enriched before they hit the support system” so they are routed to members of the support team best equipped to handle them, Abramson said.
In addition to Platinum Services, the Advanced Customer Support organization is releasing 3 new products available for a fee to a broader group of Oracle customers. They are:
- Advanced monitoring/resolution, which allows Oracle customers to extend those services to non-Platinum Oracle products or to some 2,000 products of competitors.
- End-user performance monitoring, which extends Oracle support “all the way to user terminals,” Abramson said.
- Solution support center, through which enterprises can contract with Oracle for a dedicated, on-site service teams.
Abramson said he expects Oracle to make Platinum Services available for at least some of its business applications in the near future.
Ann All is the editor of Enterprise Apps Today. Follow Enterprise Apps Today on Twitter @EntApps2Day.
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