Oracle's new Cloud Lift Service offers free migration help

Oracle on Wednesday launched a new service offering free cloud migration assistance to new and existing cloud customers. The new Oracle Cloud Lift Service, which includes access to technical tools and cloud engineering resources, is part of the tech giant's broader effort to speed up the growth of its cloud infrastructure business. 

The new service was created for customers facing some specific perceived barriers to migration, said Vinay Kumar, SVP of Oracle Cloud Engineering. It's common, he said, for organizations to hold off on moving to the cloud because their IT teams don't have the necessary skills, the migration would take too long, or moving critical applications would be too risky. 

"Customers need help upfront to be able to use Oracle Cloud much more seamlessly," Kumar told reporters this week.  

The Oracle Cloud Lift Service takes customers "from pitch to production," he said. Oracle's engineers will help customers determine which applications should move to the cloud, architect them, run a POC, offer hands-on migration support, as well as go-live support. Once workloads are in production, Oracle will help train an organization's staff on best practices so they have the expertise to run the environment moving forward. 

"We are going to do it on their behalf, and the outcome is more predictable," Kumar said. "For the applications they care about, we're going to use time-tested tools and processes."

There are no explicit limits in terms of what workloads customers can move via the Oracle Cloud Lift Services. Oracle plans to work with each customer individual to determine whether their needs are a good fit for the program. If a customer wants to close their data center and move 300 applications to the cloud, that's not a good fit for the program, Kumar said. 

The company does anticipate that the program will largely come down to supporting six types of workloads: Oracle packaged applications (such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, etc.), custom applications built on Oracle Database, HPC workloads, cloud native applications, VMware-centric applications, and lastly, data warehouse and analytics workloads.