Enterprise software company Oracle has partnered with systems integrator Dimension Data, to drive its cloud computing offerings.
Dimension Data has become an early adopter of the recently-announced Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider Programme. Oracle created this programme to meet the requirements of its enterprise and mid-market customers who are planning for digital transformation.
Oracle is intensifying its cloud computing game as it tries to outdo rivals in the tightly-contested market. During the recent Oracle Open World 2016 in San Francisco, the world's second biggest software company announced a host of new cloud offerings.
Like rivals SAP, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, Oracle is making an aggressive shift to the cloud as customers increasingly shun the costlier licensing model.
The new cloud programme is selective, accepting only those partners with the skills and infrastructure to build, deploy, run and manage both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads.
The companies have been partners for a number of years and they say the new collaboration is a natural progression of their established relationship.
The programme also enables members to offer a complete managed service solution for workloads running on Oracle platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
At the core of the latest tie-up are issues to do with data sovereignty, bandwidth and latency that South African organisations usually grapple with.
[PICTUR-LEFT]In an interview with ITWeb last week, Stefan Diedericks, Oracle alliances and channels director for SA, said Oracle is the fastest growing cloud company in the world today.
"In order to further drive the growth in cloud computing, we need to leverage our infrastructure within our partner base in regards to skills development, resources, and go-to-market capabilities," said Diedericks.
He pointed out that Oracle has realised that to ramp up growth in the cloud market, the company needs to enhance its partnerships by working in a managed services cloud environment.
"The Oracle Managed Services Provider Programme was created to allow partners the ability to deliver and offer managed services to their customers - be it Oracle workloads or non-Oracle workloads that could run on the Oracle cloud platform."
According to Diedericks, in SA most organisations ask questions around the Protection of Personal Information Act, bandwidth as well as latency.
"This programme answers all of those questions because the Oracle cloud machine, which forms the basis of this programme, can now be deployed not only behind the customer's firewall but also on behalf of that customer by a partner inside their partner's data centre with one contract that they sign.
"This allows us to access many more markets through things like data sovereignty and data protection on behalf of the customer. In terms of the programme, we focus on assisting the partner with training and access to Oracle's product roadmaps. Dimension Data also now has access to Oracle's solution architecting in their data centre."
Rogan Moore, Britehouse Group CTO and group executive for solutions and services for Oracle, said Dimension Data's role as a partner is to bring the participation of its clients in the Oracle IaaS offering in a more flexible way.
Britehouse is a Dimension Data-owned company that provides digital solutions to global and African companies. Dimension Data concluded the acquisition of Britehouse in October last year.
"We already have data centre investments in South Africa so this will be able to solve issues surrounding data sovereignty. From a connectivity perspective, Dimension Data has also made some investments in the underlying networks," said Moore.
He added that Dimension Data's role is to work with Oracle to ensure the companies have the appropriate networks and data centre infrastructure to enable local organisations to have better and flexible access to Oracle's IaaS products.
"Dimension Data and Oracle are global partners who have been collaborating on different aspects for a number of years. The companies have a global diamond partner agreement. Oracle has been a strategic partner for our applications and cloud strategy in Dimension Data. We have invested a lot of money in Oracle technologies and in skilling up our Oracle workforce to be able to run Oracle platforms and technologies."
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