Oracle Cloud Lift Services Aim To Help Partners Pull Off ‘Daunting’ Migrations

The offering is intended to complement partner services, enabling solution providers to more quickly move customers onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, an Oracle executive told CRN.

A new Oracle offering that makes in-house cloud specialists available to solution providers and customers has the potential to reduce cloud workload migration time, enhancing the partner opportunity around the company’s cloud platform, according to executives from Oracle and a top partner of the company.

Oracle’s recently launched Cloud Lift Services offering has caught the attention of Edison, N.J.-based solution provider Avaap, said Steve Whinery, vice president for the Oracle business at Avaap. The Oracle services should help with overcoming the sometimes “daunting” infrastructure phrase for cloud migrations, in order to more quickly get into application development and implementation, Whinery told CRN.

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The goal of Oracle Cloud Lift Services is to speed up the migration of workloads to the cloud—ideally, making migrations possible in days rather than months—with the assistance of Oracle cloud architects, the company said.

Whinery said that getting the conversation started about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using an offering such as Cloud Lift Services is important to Avaap, as the solution provider looks to continue the growth of its Oracle business.

“Sometimes, organizations don’t know how to start the whole conversation,” said Whinery, whose company became an Oracle partner through its 2019 acquisition of technology consulting firm Navigator Management Partners. Now an Oracle Gold partner, Avaap has more than 500 employees and mainly serves customers in health care, government and higher education.

Avaap saw 20-percent growth in billable hours for its Oracle practice in 2020 compared to 2019, and “I’m targeting a higher increase looking ahead,” Whinery said.

Oracle’s Cloud Lift Services have been available to select customers for about six months, and opened up to all customers at the end of March, said Vinay Kumar, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. As part of the program, Oracle says that its specialists can provide assistance to partners and customers in areas such as assessment, design, migration and management.

The Cloud Lift Services offering will not take work away from partners, Kumar told CRN.

“Every partner should find this service complementary,” he said. “We’re not trying to fill the space the partner occupies.”

Because many customers find their way to Oracle’s cloud and services offerings through the channel, “partners are a core part of growing our cloud platform,” Kumar said.

Eligible workloads include Oracle packaged applications and custom applications built on Oracle Database or Exadata. VMware deployments, Kubernetes-based applications, serverless applications and third-party applications such as Altair Hyperworks are also eligible.

Complex migrations—and any migrations involving more than 10 databases and applications—may not be included, according to Oracle.

The launch of Oracle Cloud Lift Services comes as the Austin, Texas-based company seeks to continue the growth of its cloud services business.

During Oracle’s most recent quarterly earnings call, in March, Oracle CEO Safra Catz told investors that total cloud services and license support revenue for the quarter was $7.3 billion—up 5 percent year-over-year.

Infrastructure cloud services and license support brought in $4.3 billion, up 4 percent from the year before, according to the Oracle’s financial report for the quarter ended Feb. 28.