Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Reviews

I'm not a cloud engineer. I'm the head of the automation department. Given we are a small startup, everybody is a jack of all trades, and I need to know my way around the cloud a little bit as well. We work with computer instances, and we have some databases there.

We have some security groups and IP whitelisting so that we can run our automation for certain clients and do some VPNs. We don't have any product or application built on the solution. It just supports the process automation that we run.

The most valuable features of the solution are APEX, Threat Detector, and Cloud Guard. These features help secure our infrastructure from threats.

The AI capabilities and the power automate platform that Azure is offering seem to be way ahead of what Oracle is offering.

I have been using Oracle Cloud Platform for two years.

If we need to copy and paste workflows around and around, then the solution's scalability and maintainability are not very good. If we need to adjust something, we can't do it in just one place. We need to adjust it in all the workflows built for that use case.

I rate the solution a four out of ten for scalability.

We tried to contact Oracle technical support, but their response time was not very good, and I'm not sure if we ever resolved anything. We had an issue with the subscription, and the technical support team's response wasn't very prompt.

I compared Oracle Cloud Platform with other competitor providers like Azure, and I don't think Oracle is too expensive. Oracle is doing its best to stay below the market price. For example, the price for the compute instances, among other things, is better than its competition. Compared with what we paid when we were on the startup program, the solution's pricing is really high for a small startup company like us.

I played around with the Oracle Integration Cloud Platform and didn't really find my way to it. Other developers' experience with it was also clumsy. I haven't found a way to make dynamic connectors where we could have different payloads. We needed to create copies of already existing workflows if we wanted to use them for another client or use case. There was no way to have some sort of dynamic input parameter that would help us.

I would probably recommend Azure to other users because it's more intuitive. I think Oracle Cloud Platform is a better option for somebody who's been working with Oracle in the past. There are things in Oracle Cloud Platform that are better than in Azure. For example, the speed of deployment seems to work better in the Oracle Cloud Platform.

In Azure, our experience is that everything takes a while before the changes take place. Simple things like IP whitelisting and adding permissions take a while in Azure, whereas it's more instant in Oracle. For a new user, Oracle Cloud Platform is not as intuitive as Azure.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

My company uses Oracle Cloud for our infrastructure as a service cloud.

Database instances and computer storage are areas with shortcomings in the product that need improvement.

The product's technical support team must improve their speed of response.

Oracle Cloud is not an easy tool to use, so I would like to see it offer faster connectivity and better migration capabilities in the future.

I have been using Oracle Cloud for two years. I use the solution in my company as our company is a customer of Oracle. I don't remember the version of the solution.

It is a stable solution since it offers a very powerful performance to its users.

My company has more than 100 users of the product, with around 12 administrators.

I am satisfied with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with AWS. Oracle Cloud is available at a low cost compared to AWS. Compared to Oracle Cloud, AWS offers more services and quality at a high cost.

AWS also provides a database and S3 as a part of their services. Oracle is more easy to learn, while AWS is hard to learn.

The initial setup of Oracle Cloud was very simple.

Our company has senior engineers who oversee the product's setup phase.

The costs involved are low when it comes to Oracle Cloud, especially when compared to AWS.

I am not satisfied with Oracle Cloud as a product.

Oracle Kubernetes, Oracle AI, and Oracle Analytics are good, making the database Oracle a better choice for my company.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is suitable for hosting application databases.

You can deploy a VM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. If you require high availability for your applications, you can run them within the VM, which will function effectively. It's reliable, performs well, and is often faster than running applications on separate machines due to optimized performance and networking capabilities within OCI.

We initially started the company focusing on infrastructure, intending to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Our entire infrastructure is built on OCI.

OCI is a cloud computing service, not an appliance. It offers various services, including database management, storage, networking, and more, which are crucial for any organization's IT infrastructure. Oracle Database is widely used and robust database management system. OCI offers various services beyond database management. Other available databases and cloud platforms may suit different organizational needs.

Storage is indeed a critical aspect of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The technology and security measures implemented within OCI's storage services are highly advanced and provide extensive scalability, reliability, and data protection capabilities. The management tools offered for OCI's storage services are unparalleled and offer robust features for efficient storage administration.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure stands out due to its exceptional performance and advanced technology. The progress and innovation demonstrated by Oracle are truly impressive and exceed my expectations. OCI's capabilities are remarkable, and it is challenging to identify any weaknesses. One noteworthy aspect is OCI's ability to integrate seamlessly with other cloud platforms, offering unparalleled flexibility. Unlike other clouds that limit service provision solely within their ecosystem, OCI allows customers to interact with various cloud environments, including in-house servers. This interoperability extends to significant competitors like Azure, providing users with unmatched connectivity options. In summary, OCI sets a high standard in the cloud industry, and I am grateful for its capabilities.

While OCI provides a solid foundation with its existing analytics and data warehousing tools, businesses often have unique needs that require tailored solutions. While Oracle offers great tools for developers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts, there's a need for further customization to unlock the platform's full potential. Compared to other vendors, Oracle stands out with its AI, analytics, and data management offerings. Still, additional expertise and customization can help businesses maximize their OCI investment and achieve their goals.

I have been using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for 15 years.

The stability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is noteworthy. The key difference lies in its private cloud appliance and manager for scaling compared to other solutions.

The support team is exceptional.

The deployment is easy and doesn't take long.

OCI offers competitive pricing options, making it attractive for various use cases. However, for our infrastructure needs, we opted for a hybrid approach. We preferred to maintain certain components on-premises while integrating others with OCI. This flexibility allows us to leverage the benefits of both environments effectively. Pricing options vary depending on licensing arrangements and the specific services used. For instance, if you already possess database licenses, you can use them on OCI. Additionally, you pay for the resources or services consumed, which may include machine instances or other relevant services.

As an expert in business intelligence, I understand the importance of tailoring reports to meet the unique needs of each business. While standard reports may serve as a foundation, the reality is that every business operates differently, with CEOs and financial departments often prefer customized analytics aligned with their specific vision and objectives. Oracle provides a range of tools to facilitate this customization, including ReadyMail. However, there are instances where ReadyMail may not fully meet the requirements. In such cases, exploring additional Oracle technologies to ensure businesses have access to the analytics and KPIs necessary to drive informed decision-making is essential.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a versatile platform, but it may not perfectly cater to every unique business requirement globally. That's why coding and preparation are essential. Additionally, call setups, analytics configurations, and data warehousing are necessary. While some existing reports are available, they may not cover all aspects, particularly for Fusion Applications or ERP Business Suite applications. Therefore, users often need to create their own reports. Previously, Discover BI was used for reporting, but now, Oracle Enterprise BI offers comprehensive solutions. One advantage is the ability to tailor intelligence, whether building warehouses within the Oracle database or implementing intelligent features like KPI tracking.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is at the forefront of AI integration. Oracle has made significant strides in leveraging AI across its applications and machine engineering. By incorporating AI into various aspects, Oracle ensures it remains ahead on the cutting edge of technology, offering the best of AI capabilities. This demonstrates Oracle's commitment to delivering innovative products.

We host one of our applications on Oracle Cloud Platform.

We wanted to host one of the applications for our global uses, so we posted it on the OCI platform. Since disaster recovery, we are looking for a solution where we can start small and can scale up whenever we need it.

Oracle Cloud Platform has good scalability.

The solution’s support could be improved. In the past, the solution's customer support team took a long time to solve a few of my technical issues.

I have been using Oracle Cloud Platform for one and a half years.

I rate Oracle Cloud Platform a seven out of ten for stability.

Around 100 users are using the solution in our organization, and we plan to increase the usage.

I rate Oracle Cloud Platform an eight out of ten for scalability.

I rate Oracle Cloud Platform’s technical support five and a half out of ten.

I rate Oracle Cloud Platform a seven out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

Oracle Cloud Platform's pricing is comparable to other solutions, but it is definitely not cheap. I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten.

The solution is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I would recommend Oracle Cloud Platform to users who have Oracle use cases.

Overall, I rate Oracle Cloud Platform a seven out of ten.

We use the solution in insurance and financial institutions like banks.

The solution is better than its previous on-premise version. The on-premise version was not flexible enough for end-user reporting requirements. The product enables users to create their own reports. It is really helpful.

The product is not stable enough for our SCM client’s requirements. The clients' requirements are not feasible for the out-of-the-box solution. The product features related to the manufacturing domain must be improved.

I have been using the solution for five to six years.

The tool is not stable. We ended up doing additional tasks to fulfill the client’s requirements. It is not that flexible.

The solution is scalable. Our customers are mainly enterprise-level businesses.

The technical support is very good. It has improved over the last few years. Now, we get better responses from the engineers.

Positive

The installation is very easy. The time taken for deployment depends on the volume of the configuration. Generally, it can be done within one or two days. We have one SME and another person to support the SME in configuring the product. It is very easy to maintain the tool.

The product’s pricing is reasonable compared to other tools in the market. We pay a yearly subscription. Our clients mainly pay the initial license cost and the yearly subscription fee.

If someone wants to implement the product for a new client, they must understand the features and functionalities available out of the box. I would rate the tool a ten out of ten for the finance modules, but I would rate it a seven for manufacturing. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

One of the use cases of Oracle Cloud is that it helps use Oracle Database as a Service. In my company, the one database that we have on the cloud is supported, operated, and maintained by Oracle.

The solution's most valuable features are that it is easy to use and scalable. One of the best things about Oracle Cloud is that you need not worry about the underlying infrastructure it was deployed with since it allows you to increase the capacity with just one click.

If you want more CPUs, you can increase the overall number in your environment.

I don't have sufficient experience with Oracle Cloud to be able to comment on the areas where improvements are required.

Oracle Cloud is not a user-friendly tool. From an improvement perspective, I want Oracle Cloud to be more user-friendly.

I have experience with Oracle Cloud. I do not directly use Oracle Cloud, but I use the tool for a client of my company who uses the product.

It is a scalable solution. You just need to consider increasing your resources to use the solution's scalability features.

There aren't multiple users of the solution in my company. Only one person in my company uses the solution. My company uses Oracle Database in Oracle Cloud to create and use persistent stores. We also use Oracle Cloud in our company in relation to persistent data.

Even though my company has used the product's technical support, I am not the person who spoke with Oracle's technical team.

The initial setup of Oracle Cloud is simple.

During the setup phase of Oracle Cloud, you just need to click to deal with the provisioning part, after which the tool provides you with assistance, especially regarding the CPUs and RAM you need.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The product offers a subscription-based licensing model. Though I am not sure, there are payments to be made to Oracle at the end of every quarter.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

Our specialty is insurance software. We were primarily vendors for software licensing, but we've transitioned our product to the cloud in the last two years.

The deployment depends on what a client wants. We use public clouds for clients that are willing to take our products as a SaaS model. For the ones that are on-prem, we split the load between the core platform, which is on-prem, and non-essential services, which are on the cloud.

I head the sales and marketing team. So, specifically on the feature set side, multi-tenancy is the one that I'm most familiar with. It's also the one that we found to be the most beneficial to us because it allows us to take clients that have multiple sites. For instance, one of our larger clients, which is a bank based out of South Africa, has offices in multiple countries. It allows us to multi-tenant each and create a tenant for each country within multi-tenanted architecture.

The biggest challenge I'm having with the cloud offering is the sizing. So, pricing becomes difficult. The sizing challenge is in terms of being very clear on how your data growth or your requirements would be. It becomes a bit difficult to be able to ensure that there's enough future proofing in what you've signed. At the same time, the whole idea behind the cloud is to be able to pay for what you use. You don't want to pay for something that you're not using.

It has been two years. 

All our clients are enterprise clients. We don't have any small clients.

The main challenge that we have with scalability is the opacity and the pricing. Pricing becomes a challenge because you're not very clear on at what point in time you'll be breaking or you'll be exceeding the size you already acquired. That is the challenge, but Oracle powers some of the biggest cloud platforms in the world, and so do AWS and Azure. All of them have the ability and skill to run very large platforms. 

They have an office locally. Amazon has only just started an office locally. Microsoft has been here for a long time. We've been Oracle Partners for 22 years, So, we're familiar with them anyway.

I know it's very straightforward. Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and Amazon AWS have some sort of out-of-the-box packages that you can purchase. Oracle also has a sandbox environment that they can provision for you to be able to set up your operation just to try it out. So, the setup is straightforward.

Its pricing is complex, but as partners, we can get away with quite a bit of discounting because we deal with them directly. 

I would rate their pricing probably a one or two out of five because they're quite expensive. Microsoft Azure will probably be the cheapest because depending on the Microsoft product that you have, they have some sort of bundling. There are things that they give you to get you onto Azure. AWS is probably somewhere in the middle.

We work in a very narrow space. Our specialty is insurance software. We have an insurance ERP. We are an ISV. So, we make our own software. In the sub-Saharan African market, we're, in a way, the largest vendor. So, our recommendation for the clientele that we serve would ideally be Oracle. 

There are a lot of data laws that are being enacted. Kenya is one of the big ones enacting data access and data sovereignty laws, which is probably denting a lot of cloud offerings. However, there are a lot of co-located operations where people are providing data centers within the country. The in-country cloud providers, such as MTN and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, give you a lot more flexibility. In that scenario, you get a lot of flexibility in hybridizing the cloud setup that you have, and all three of them would work pretty much the same way. From a Kenyan or African perspective, Oracle and Microsoft have a very good footprint across all the countries we operate in. We're in eight countries now. Amazon AWS is only just starting in Kenya. I don't know if they're anywhere else. They might be in Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. So, they would have a hub-and-spoke type model in terms of how you'd be able to support it. If I were to recommend anything, it would be Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

I would rate Oracle Cloud a nine out of ten.

Oracle Cloud has many use cases, and even open-source or non-Oracle products can be hosted on it. Some customers of my company even host SAP applications on Oracle Cloud. People use it for healthcare applications and other third-party applications. People also use it for development purposes.

Oracle has Development Cloud Services bundled with Java, so people use it for application development. Oracle Cloud is also being used for high-performance computing, for example, in wireless industries with crash tests or speed tests that create a huge amount of data in a short period.

Other use cases for Oracle Cloud include large-scale migrating and hosting of databases, for example, enterprise-class databases and open-source databases, which is something that my company does.

Oracle Cloud is also used for hosting ERP products such as SAP Oracle, Oracle ERP, EQL, JD Edwards, etc. It's also used for engineering, for example, GIS applications.

Currently, my company has one customer doing a POC and plans to go live in early 2023, once the POC is approved. For this customer, Oracle Cloud will be utilized for multiple GIS applications, collecting location data through IoT, etc.

Oracle Cloud has multiple use cases. In the area of data management, there's the Oracle Data Lakehouse which is a complete suite of services for managing both structured and unstructured data from different sources. My company works with various customers on multiple use cases. These are customers from different industries involved in different scenarios. One healthcare customer is analyzing the high volume of data multidimensionally with patients, particularly through predictive analysis of certain treatments. Because of in-built products on Oracle Cloud, my team can do some of the concepts based on what industry leaders have in mind. My team can translate that into action points very quickly. 

Other use cases of Oracle Cloud include tech management, ERP, and geological information systems. You can also use it for asset reports, maintenance reports, and utility management such as electricity, water, telephone, etc. It can also be utilized for transportation, traffic management, management of parking spaces for large cities or large building complexes, etc. Oracle Cloud can help in building applications for a smart city. It's suitable for a lot of use cases. You just need to utilize, model, configure, and implement Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Cloud has wonderful features and offerings as a service. It's not just a pure-play cloud product or SaaS application. It has a complete suite from infrastructure to platform as a service to software as a service, and this is what I find most valuable in Oracle Cloud. For infrastructure on the cloud or infrastructure as a service on the cloud, there's OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). 

Oracle Cloud is easily available. You just click it. I also found the feature of creating a landing zone valuable. Oracle Cloud is also very flexible as it lets you have a hybrid cloud model along with other cloud solutions. I also like that it offers good management on the cloud.

Oracle Cloud is ready to use as a service, and that's wonderful because the time to market is very quick.

I also like that Oracle Cloud offers high performance and high availability. A lot of people claim that there's high availability in their companies' cloud operations, but technically speaking, pure high availability in today's context is found in Oracle Cloud.

What I'd like to see from Oracle Cloud is an option for the customer to have a single portal to manage and monitor not just Oracle Cloud, but some of the on-premise products in the hybrid scenario as well. If it can be shipped out as an out-of-the-box solution, that would be wonderful. It's not so easy, but for a company like Oracle, it shouldn't be a problem.

Many customers go through a lot of effort and burn money to achieve this, so it's an opportunity for Oracle to provide it for customers looking for this type of solution.

I've been working with Oracle Cloud for fifteen years.

Oracle Cloud is a stable solution. My team has been using it for a good amount of time and it's very stable.

Oracle Cloud has good scalability. To a certain level, you can scale it without even issuing a separate PO. Beyond that, you can always get in touch with the Oracle team and discuss how to scale Oracle Cloud.

The technical support for Oracle Cloud is excellent.

The initial setup for Oracle Cloud is easy, but after you purchase it, you have to wait for the Oracle representative to onboard you to the cloud. Oracle may have a specific reason for this step, so I won't tell Oracle to automate it. If there's a scope to do it, then it's all well and good. Otherwise, Oracle should solve this.

Some customers enjoyed ROI from Oracle Cloud. From an operations point of view, sixty percent of the customers who've embraced the latest versions of Oracle Cloud were able to optimize the cost of the operations within the first three quarters.

The price for Oracle Cloud may seem expensive, but if you start comparing features and what Oracle offers, you'll realize that the pricing for Oracle Cloud is competitive.

If you consider every aspect of Oracle Cloud, you'll see that its price tag is reasonable because it has a good user interface, user experience, and management. Oracle Cloud is a sophisticated infrastructure and the level of management it allows you to enjoy isn't available in other solutions, so I wouldn't worry about needing to invest huge money into it because it's a wonderful product to use.

My company is a partner of Oracle Cloud, and it deals with different versions for clients. My team is supporting all versions of Oracle Cloud, but now customers prefer the latest version because of the digital transformations across all industries and all regions of the world.

Across all regions and verticals, in the customer community, people worry about multiple aspects in terms of security, scalability, etc. My advice is when you're planning to migrate to Oracle Cloud or any other public cloud, I can say that Oracle Cloud has all features, for example, routine security and all other features bundled, without any extra costs. Data egress is also free up to 10GB. From compliance and regulatory perspectives, it's all in place in every region Oracle Cloud operates. This is what you should look into, especially if you're an enterprise-class customer when you need to host your business or enterprise applications, or any mission-critical applications. You should seriously look into it and utilize Oracle Cloud because it's compliant in all areas and aspects.

My rating for Oracle Cloud is nine out of ten.