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AWS to OCI: How our Clients are Saving Money, Improving Performance, and Reducing Risk

Earlier this year, I helped a client move one of their Oracle Applications off of AWS and into Oracle Cloud (OCI). This medium-sized business (about 250 employees) wanted better performance for their applications, and they also wanted to reduce their licensing compliance risk, but what they didn’t expect was to save money.

I’m sure by now we’ve all heard a million reasons why OCI is the best place for your Oracle workloads, so I won’t waste your time repeating them all here. But what you may not have considered is the impact on licensing and in turn, your risk. These were the driving factors for my client.

You see, they’d been audited (and burned) in the past and weren’t keen to make that mistake again. They were concerned that they might be out of compliance, worried about what it would cost to get back in compliance, and even more worried about what would happen if they were caught before they could fix the situation.  

Their solution? Move to a license-included version of OCI so they don’t have to worry about licensing compliance!

But how did they save money if they had to pay to migrate to OCI?

We’ll dive into their specific use case in a moment, but if you’re curious about how costs would compare for your own workloads, there are some objective outlets like Holori, or Mercato that can help you get a better handle on the true costs.

For this client, if they continued business as usual, their expected costs for this year were as follows:

• $155,000 – Applications Support Bill
• $190,000 – Oracle Tech/Database Licensing
• $35,000 – AWS Hosting
• $40,000 – Assorted other expenses like internal staffing requirements

All total, they were paying about $420,000 for this solution.

However, because they decided to move to OCI, their annual costs will now be:

• $155,000 – Applications Support Bill (unchanged)
• $11,000 – Oracle Tech/Database Licensing (almost all licensing was included with OCI)
• $162,000 – OCI Licensing (which includes White Glove Support from Eclipsys)

All total, this solution will only cost $328,000.

Now it’s important to remember that they did have to pay for a migration. This cost them ~$70,000, meaning that their annual savings dropped from $92,000 down to $22,000, but this was only an expense in year 1. Moving forward, not only will they not have to pay for a migration, but their annual savings will actually grow because their OCI pricing is locked in, whereas the tech/database licensing we all but eliminated continues to grow annually.

The annual costs of the two options can be seen below:

All total, this client is expected to save over $400,000 in 4 years. This is money they’re planning to use for other vital projects and to help fund new innovations for their IT department.

Finding the right cloud for your workload can be difficult, but getting there in a timely manner and without breaking the bank can be even more difficult. If you’re looking for advice from someone who’s done it before then give us a call.

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