Universal credits can be applied to any OCI service – customers simply pay their bill with credits on the OCI console. Similarly, a customer’s Support Rewards are automatically added in the OCI Console every month and can be applied anytime. As a result, Oracle says that a customer could effectively reimburse all of their Oracle support fees by migrating a handful of workloads to the cloud. Oracle promises to its customers “to continuously and always protect your investment in technology,” co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said in a virtual event on Tuesday. Ellison touted Oracle’s unique position in the cloud industry as the only company with a large-scale applications business as well as a large-scale infrastructure business. “We think those businesses are highly complementary,” he said. “The application developers let the infrastructure developers know what they need to be more successful.” While the Support Rewards program creates a clear incentive for customers with large license deals with Oracle, Oracle sees its own financial benefit – for every dollar of support licensing it’s giving up; it earns $4 in cloud revenue. During Oracle’s fourth-quarter conference call, CEO Safra Catz said that the cloud is “fundamentally a more profitable business compared to on-premise.” OCI consumption revenue in Q4 was up 103%. Oracle’s goal, OCI VP Ross Brown told ZDNet, “is to transform from a license-oriented company… to a services company that is the platform you can run your entire business on, from custom applications in OCI and data science and machine learning to running on our SaaS platforms.” That has meant not only rethinking Oracle’s technology but its engagement with customers as well, Brown said. For instance, sales reps are now paid based on customer consumption rather than closed deals, encouraging them to develop stronger customer relationships. Additionally, customer support teams are embedded with developer teams so that feature requirements that come from customer support requests get the same prioritization as other new features. Meanwhile, the Support Rewards program is part of a collection of initiatives Oracle has launched to encourage and facilitate cloud migration. That includes Oracle Bring Your Own License, Oracle Customer to Cloud, and the Oracle Cloud Lift programs. The Support Rewards program is straightforward, with just a couple of caveats. For instance, Support Rewards can’t be applied to third-party products like VMware licensing.
