• April 11, 2019
  • Catagory Development

Pick the right Oracle solutions for the right business problem

By : Fabio Grosso

Whether you’re an existing customer or looking at greenfield opportunities, Oracle solutions can be a little overwhelming when you’re trying to pick the best business application for the job.

As an Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) with a deep and long history of implementing Oracle solutions for our customers, we’ve found the best way to pick the right product is to define the problem and your business objectives. From there, you can align it with the best Oracle offering. It’s still a big job, so we’ve put together a little guide to help customers get started, whether you’re eyeing new computing infrastructure or business applications.

Make Better Business Decisions

If your goal is to improve productivity for users and scale up your business to be more competitive while reducing costs, you’ll want to start with Oracle Cloud.

Moving to a subscription model automatically lowers your costs because for a monthly payment you have access to a wealth of infrastructure that would have otherwise required a great deal of upfront investment on your part. Not only you do you save money on hardware, but you immediately have more business flexibility. Managed Oracle IaaS enables you to move all your business applications to the cloud, which minimizes the disruption that usually comes with on-premise system upgrades or software changes.

Oracle also offers a great deal of business applications you can run in the cloud. If your aim is to gain greater visibility and improve profitability, you should consider Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Supply Chain Management and Oracle E-Business Suite to drive smarter decisions through analytics, improve workflows and employee productivity.

Manage Data Better

Of course, you can’t make smarter decisions without the right information, so if you’re looking at corralling your data better, there are a few Oracle solutions that can help.

One the realities of today’s business is that you have multiple systems and applications that ideally should be using the same data—that’s where Oracle Middleware comes in. It can help you pull together files and datapoints to provide the single source of truth business applications need to deliver value. An Oracle Database, meanwhile, can help you harness customer information.

Business and applications need a strong IT backbone

Your mission critical data and business applications only deliver the most value when they have a solid foundation supporting them.

Oracle offers several hardware and infrastructure options that make sure data-driven business applications operate optimally while also helping you to streamline costs. Oracle Virtual Machine, for example, can help you reduce your overall compute costs. But if you want to not only improve your compute performance and maximize return-on-investment from your Oracle applications, you should consider an Oracle engineered system such as the Oracle Database Appliance, or Oracle Exadata, which provides even more power with less maintenance.

Pulling it all together

Whether it’s just a couple of Oracle solutions or a large combination of business applications and Oracle engineered systems, you can pull everything together with Oracle Enterprise Manager, which provides a single view of all your Oracle deployments in a central location.

The breadth and depth of Oracle solutions doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Whether you’re an existing customer or eyeing Oracle for the first time, an experienced technology partner can help you adopt and update your business applications so you can scale your business while reducing costs.

Fabio Gross in senior channel manager with Supra ITS. Learn more about Supra ITS’ status as an MSP with our handy FAQ.

  • November 13, 2018
  • Catagory Oracle

Oracle MSP certification recognizes Supra ITS’ combined application and infrastructure expertise

By : Arun Prakash

Supra ITS has a long history of helping customers get the most from their Oracle investments, but we realized it was important for us to step up our game. After years of experience as an Oracle Worldwide Gold partner, we’re now an Oracle Managed Service Provider (MSP)—one of the few in Canada. The Oracle MSP certification reflects our managed hybrid cloud focus while aligning with Oracle’s strategy to move their customer base to the cloud.

Our Oracle MSP designation reflects our belief that as full-service technology partner it’s essential we understand both the application and infrastructure layers. We provide implementation and transition services on our customers’ premises, our private cloud or in the Oracle public cloud.Supra ITS is uniquely suited to offer its Oracle services not only in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) space, but also in Oracle cloud applications offerings. Our expertise managing infrastructure as well as applications gives Supra ITS an edge over other Oracle partners who do not have the breadth of experience across both.

Ready for the Oracle Public Cloud in Canada

If you’re looking to move your Oracle environments to the cloud you now have an Oracle partner that can provision and manage your IaaS and PaaS requirements—especially ideal if you’re looking to move to the Oracle Cloud, whether it’s Cloud Machine behind your firewall or the Oracle Public Cloud. Most of all, we provide the resources and expertise so you can easily ramp up your Oracle cloud adoption without breaking the bank.

You don’t have to be an existing Oracle customer either. If you’re looking at greenfield opportunities to leverage Oracle’s IaaS/PaaS and Public Cloud, we can help get you started. We also offer shared support services for Oracle ERP in the cloud, as well as implementation and support for other popular Oracle applications such as human capital management, supply chain management and Hyperion.

Of course, a key piece of the Oracle foundation has also been its database, so Supra ITS also provides shared support services for Oracle Core DBA as well as Oracle Apps DBA. We provide DBA Management capabilities, so you don’t get bogged down with the patching, tuning and diagnostics activities. Instead, your DBA staff can focus driving new business value by building new analytics capabilities.

Ultimately, being recognized as an Oracle MSP means you have a partner that can support the entire spectrum of services you need to get the most from your Oracle applications, both in terms of resource efficiencies and bottom-line business benefits.

For more information about our what our Oracle MSP designation means for you, check out our FAQ.

Arun Prakash is executive vice president of Supra ITS.

  • January 4, 2018
  • Catagory Oracle

How Canadian businesses can leverage the Oracle Cloud today

By : Aseem Telli

Over the last few years, the software giant has made all their applications that were historically large, on-premise deployments more broadly available to businesses in the cloud. Oracle’s strategy is based on the prediction that enterprises will be completely cloud-based in less than a decade. More broadly, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has levelled the playing field for companies all sizes, enabling small and mid-sized enterprises to take advantage of tools that were previously only available to big companies with deep pockets.

Oracle Public Cloud puts existing customers first

The Oracle Public Cloud is similar to Microsoft Azure in that both were built around their core technologies – Oracle DB and Microsoft Windows, respectively. But while Microsoft’s approach has been to open its Azure Stack to other software companies to build on their Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service ecosystem, the Oracle Public Cloud is being built around its large ecosystem of customers who invested in the Oracle Database.

Compared to Microsoft Azure and AWS, the Oracle Public Cloud represents the evolution to next-generation computing options and creates greenfield opportunities. Unlike its competitors, it not only supports IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, but also Bare Metal, on-premises and can be hosted at an Oracle MSP infrastructure. Although Oracle Public Cloud is not available yet in Canada, it does have its own data centre here to address the data residency for Canadian customers for Oracle SaaS offerings and Canadian service providers for IaaS.

What Canadian enterprises must consider

There are many reasons why mid-sized enterprises should consider the Oracle Cloud, whether they already run Oracle applications or are looking migrate to them:

  • Core applications are built on Oracle
  • Security is a core element of Oracle’s foundation (the company counts the CIA as its first customer)
  • Flexible deployment models, including on-premise, hybrid and cloud
  • IaaS pricing is comparable to competitors

Organizations looking to build applications that could be deployed in the Oracle Public Cloud in Canada can have peace of mind that all of Oracle’s core components and intellectual property, such as Database, Virtual Machine, Middleware and Business Intelligence, are integrated, which allows them to get up and running quickly with an enterprise-class solution.

However, there also several challenges organizations must consider when mulling a move to the Oracle Public Cloud. For one thing, there is a lack of skilled people who can answer the common questions customers will have, such as how many CPUs they need and the licensing costs, making it hard to get started. There is also a limited number of Oracle ecosystem vendors available, which means there could be a premium cost to bringing a third-party provider onboard to help turn on services.

The biggest hurdle is that the Oracle Public Cloud is technically not available yet in Canada, so today, companies here must deploy in the U.S. Right now, the company is selling these on-premise Oracle Cloud deployments in the short-term with the knowledge that will be coming to Canada eventually.

Get started with the Oracle Public Cloud

It is possible to begin the journey to the Oracle Cloud in Canada today without having to deploy south of the border. An experienced Oracle partner can host your applications and database in its cloud by leveraging the Oracle Cloud Machine platform. When it’s time to move, they can migrate you to the Oracle Public Cloud and still provide you with managed services in either environment. This gives you the option of taking your on-premise environment for applications such as Oracle ERP into the Oracle Cloud without switching to SaaS, which can be challenging for highly customized environments. Instead, you simply lift and shift to the cloud so you need no longer worry about infrastructure.

Tapping an Oracle managed service provider with deep expertise in hosting, managed services Oracle deployments and Oracle application suite can set you up for success for true hybrid cloud service that offers the flexibility of the cloud, while delivering control and on-premises IT