Moving to the cloud is not only about migrating workloads to IaaS, it’s a total business transformation. A transformation that can become more difficult, the more established and successful a software company is under traditional, on premises businesses.
In the simplest form of that model, a software vendor is responsible for building and testing a version in a variety of underlying infrastructure environments, packing code for delivery and advising customers of required specs. Once the company hands the product over to its customer, its role is largely complete outside of agreed support and maintenance terms. This approach is fully incompatible with the “as a service” models of the cloud.
For these companies, the cloud transition means casting aside built-up corporate reflexes, institutional cultures, and methods of operation that enabled the company to succeed in the first place. This was the challenge facing the Oracle industry global business units (GBUs). Each GBU industry group represents an established leading provider of software within its respective industry vertical, with tried and true software, business models, and approaches to customer relationships. Becoming a services provider required us to change how we thought about each aspect of ourselves and our working relationships, internally and externally, even as we were wrestling with the technical aspects of migrating to Oracle Gen 2 Cloud.
By offering a service, and not a product, the GBUs became a real, daily presence in our customers’ operations. Their crises became our crises – we weren’t just a part of their tool set, we were a part of their daily workflow. In doing so, we were asking for their trust, and we had to be prepared to earn that trust every day. Everything from our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to our customer service to our operations team had to adjust so we could handle our customer’s problems with in a way that meets their needs.
The real challenge lie in how the customer-facing cloud transformation was mirrored internally. Ultimately, we could only become an effective provider of cloud services by also building an internal organization that was effective at consuming cloud services. Before we moved to the cloud, internal cloud operations teams kept tight control over their particular aspect of delivery. Becoming a cloud service required these teams to become consumers of underlying IaaS and services components as well. As a result, the transition to a cloud service model really constituted multiple, smaller transitions as teams realigned and rethought their service boundaries and commitments to one another. In order to move forward, we had to let go of some of the processes and procedures that had made us successful for years.
In the first entry on our series in Cloud Business Planning, 3.1 Transitioning to a Cloud Services Portfolio, we discuss this problem and explore how moving to the cloud changed how the Oracle GBUs had to re-conceive our business, from customer to internal processes, organization, and culture.
Join us again next month, as discuss how transforming into a cloud service provider and consumer changed our approach to managing short- and long-term financial decisions, as well as making decisions about where, when, and how to invest in evolving our cloud services.
