The value of a trusted partner in the cloud journey cannot be underestimated. Migrating to the cloud is not a core competency for most companies and chances are your core application was built without the cloud in mind. If you want to migrate to the cloud successfully, your team may definitely need some help.
Parameters to Select a Cloud Migration Partner
For Oracle customers exploring public cloud for their mission critical application, OCI automatically should come to the top of their assessment list. With the right Oracle partner to support, you can avoid shooting in the dark, exhausting yourself with extended timelines and ending up with sub-optimal outcomes. With the right partner, you can focus on your business, while they take care of your technological foundation.
Several customers express value for money and ease of working with, as important criteria to work with partners. However denying other important parameters and jumping to conclusions can lead to failure of a migration. Here are some of them:
Choosing Platform Expertise
Choose a partner with extensive Oracle cloud migration experience that includes best practices and lessons learned based on successful migrations. Oracle Platinum Partners are specialized Oracle consultants that have reached an elite level of competency tier on the Oracle PartnerNetwork for Oracle solutions.
Along with this, look out for Oracle Cloud Excellence Implementer (CEI) & Oracle MSE partner certifications. Certified on the Oracle Cloud Excellence Implementer (CEI) program, differentiates the partner by recognizing their ability to provide a superior customer experience throughout an Oracle Cloud implementation.
The Managed Service Expertise (MSE) certification, identifies and recognizes partners who have the skills, tools, and processes to build, deploy, run, and manage Oracle Cloud Solutions (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) all under a single contract and single contact.
Full-Service Provider for Advisory, Cloud & Managed Services
For long term cloud success, evaluate a partner who has capabilities to provide end to end services with advisory, cloud & managed services. They should be able to own the lifecycle partnership: selection, implementation, migration, transition, upgrade, testing, support & retirement. Agility to scale up or down throughout the partnership as dictated by project and/or support need.
Geographical Fit & Choosing Customer Service Expertise
A partner with capability for global roll-out delivery with country specific localizations, acquisitions and divestitures can ease your global migration journey considerably. Round the clock service support, with onshore/offshore combination can help optimize time and costs.
Responsibility and Security
With the number of growing breaches, security is the most important element for any organization. Security on any public cloud is a shared responsibility and hence leveraging certified partners can help take day to day, tactical execution and management off your shoulders.
Multi-Vendor Relationships
Along with capabilities to successfully migrate to the Oracle cloud, the partner must have relationships to deliver end-to-end solutions. Add-on capabilities with players like, VMWare, Redhat, Okta, Tenable, UiPath, Nagios, etc to ensure all the missing pieces for the success of your cloud transformation project can be taken care of.
Accelerators : Tools, Automation and Processes
With successful migrations the partners should have built OCI Intellectual property (IP), Scripting & Automation for EBS. This can help ensure acceleration of your migration project with such tools. Capability for inflight database upgrades, Oracle EBS R12.2 Beta Testers, can reduce significant downtime, saving on downtime losses. SSAE18 SOC-1 & SOC-2 Governance & Certifications compliances are important considerations for several industries, ensuring your partner duly follows the audit procedure.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Recognized Oracle Partners
The rigorous process followed by Gartner’s proprietary assessment of vendors and their customer references and evaluation will give a reasonable assurance on the capabilities of the partner. The two reports to consider are 1) Magic Quadrant for Oracle Cloud Applications Services, Worldwide 2) Market Guide for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services.
Oracle ACE Program
Oracle recognizes and rewards Technology and Applications professionals for their contributions through the Oracle ACE Program . These individuals are technically proficient and share their knowledge and experiences through presentations, blog posts, articles, social media posts, community forum support and more. Checkout for “Oracle ACE Cloud & Business Intelligence Directors” on the support team.
How Happy are their Other Customers?
The easiest way to assess the reputation and expertise of a cloud partner? Read their case studies and client testimonials. What are their customers saying about them? What kind of customers (e.g. sector, industry, challenges) are they?
This can give you valuable insights on how this partner has navigated past projects, particularly ones most similar to yours.
Conclusion
Choosing a Cloud Provider should be a strategic decision with careful planning as the relationship will go on for long term strategic success of your cloud initiatives. IT Convergence experience as a traditional hosting provider has paved the way for our personnel to quickly adapt to and excel at understanding OCI to not only undertake EBS migrations but to develop streamlined methodology and automation for a smooth and speedy migration. We have been performing migrations to new infrastructure for over 15 years, and that experience drives our commitment to meeting and exceeding your deadlines, and most importantly, in making the production cutover a non-event.