Insights

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

What were your biggest concerns when you considered moving from AWS to the Oracle Cloud? 

Rich Veldran (Chief Financial Officer, GoTo)

Coming out of the gate, the two things that I focused on were quality and security. At the end of the day, we're a SaaS technology company, so there's nothing more important than security. And there's nothing more important than uptime¹. So making sure that we were getting a solution that worked and that was safe was paramount. 

Along with that, cost matters. If we were going to make a change, what would it take to implement? Would it be worth any potential savings down the road?  

The hallmark of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is the state-of-the-art security— some of our products deal with security, so we needed a great environment to support that. OCI was also able to handle the most complex loads that we have. We have many different product sets all with differing needs, and we saw great results through the proof of concept (POC). Lastly, we needed to make sure that the implementation was going to be as easy as Oracle had described. It was: from POC through integration, they worked with us every step of the way.  

My team set a high bar going into it, and Oracle put the relationship first and made it a very partner-centric model. 

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

I'm assuming security is a big concern for other CFOs who have to talk to their CTOs about this. Tell us about Oracle's approach to cloud security. 

Ross Brown (Sr. Vice President, NA Cloud Ecosystem, Oracle)

Internally, we often use the phrase, “clouds are built, not bought.”  

We're an enterprise cloud. We built this for serious companies running their business on an IT platform that—as it is for GoTo—is their business. It is what you deliver on, so we designed the security with a few principles in mind: 

We believe that at no point should a customer ever look at us and say, “I got hacked because I couldn't afford to turn on and secure my tenancy.” So, we made all the tooling free, built-in and built for enterprise grade. 

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

Most CFOs need to quantify everything. Speaking CFO to CFO: what were the financial metrics and the KPI metrics you used as you were making your decision? 

Rich Veldran (Chief Financial Officer, GoTo)

We spend quite a lot on the cloud. Percentage reduction was very important to me, and in early discussions with Oracle they suggested that we would end up saving about 60% on a rate base versus competitors. In fact, that is about how it came out.  

We are still multi-cloud². We've chosen to keep volumes on both, but we've increasingly shifted volume to OCI over time. The savings are real. 

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

From a KPI perspective, were you looking at computing cost? Did you factor in labor savings? Did you look at current, net present value? If you're a CFO and you're looking at this opportunity, how would you approach it? 

Rich Veldran (Chief Financial Officer, GoTo)

We looked at our current volumes and then we projected volumes of cloud usage across all our product sets. Then we did an all-in view of cost with the incumbents that we had, and then what it would look like with OCI.  

There wasn't a whole lot of investment upfront, and it was literally: change your vendor and save 60%. At the end of the day, that's a high net present value.

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

James, how do firms like yours help CFOs overcome the cost of this migration, so companies can get the savings without exacerbating the burn even further in the short-term? 

James White (Chief Solutions Officer, Data Intensity)

Many companies get hung up on wanting to change everything all at once, which makes a migration a 12+ month cycle. It doesn't sound very attractive to wait over a year to get savings in place, so we work with clients to help minimize the migration timeline down to 3 or 4 months and get into savings quickly. There are opportunities later to go back and find further operational, technical or financial improvements. 

It's also about structuring a creative managed services agreement. For instance, one that doesn’t have you pay upfront for the effort and instead spreading it over a contract term, or making sure that you don't have dual cost with your current vendor and with your future vendor.  

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

Are there instances where there is a contract in place that they need to get out of? Do you consider that friction cost part of the “total package?”  

James White (Chief Solutions Officer, Data Intensity)

We absolutely consider any committed cost as a factor during the evaluation. Many companies will pre-purchase cloud computing, so there may already be a sunk cost. However, keep in mind that it's not always all-or-nothing: you can have a multi-cloud. We work with the Oracle team to help clients identify components that can be spun off in a first phase without disrupting the normal business cycle. We can roll off other components from the current provider as contracts come up over time. Ultimately, we find there are savings and efficiencies to be had. 

Rich Veldran (Chief Financial Officer, GoTo)

That's exactly how it played out for us. We have some minimum commitments with AWS—we were an AWS shop then, and still are—but we've moved more and more volume over time.  

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

Assuming there is a compelling financial offering put forth, how does a CFO convince their CTO that this is worth exploring and ultimately take the leap of faith? 

Rich Veldran (Chief Financial Officer, GoTo)

When I joined GoTo, we had just gone private. I was new and floated this idea, but our CTO was not interested. I met with the Oracle team myself and outlined our defense points: proving out that we can really achieve the savings and ROI, and that OCI could support security, complexity of our loads, scalability as we grow, etc.  

I insisted that they present a case that was compelling enough to consider. By the way, as a private equity owned company, you're always looking for ways to reduce cost… so if something has significant potential, you have to look at it. That's the case I made to my CTO. Today, it's a more compelling time than ever to make the case.

Ross Brown (Sr. Vice President, NA Cloud Ecosystem, Oracle)

Another CTO objection that is important for CFOs to address is around cloud skills. CTOs might object by saying their team is trained on AWS. We designed OCI so that 90% of the skills needed for AWS will immediately transfer to OCI. Strategically, you don’t want your team to be dependent on a proprietary set of skills that can only be used on one platform. That ultimately presents a financial risk. 

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

Assuming there's a good business case to consider changing cloud providers, what's the best way to learn more and get started?  

James White (Chief Solutions Officer, Data Intensity)

Reach out to us. We can run through a very simple front-end process to identify what you are spending today and what the perceived savings going forward will be. It’s a simple “bill compare” and can be done very quickly, then we can run additional scans in the environment to get data outputs to validate the information on the bill.  

From there, we can build a month-by-month ROI analysis to show when savings come into play, including current and future spend, migration services and any credits or promotions that we may be able to get as an Oracle partner. This helps determine if it’s worth pursuing a POC. More times than not, we find there is a compelling reason to pursue it. 

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

If someone really doesn't want to go from a sole provider to another sole provider, talk a bit more about the multi-cloud approach and how that works.

Rich Veldran (Chief Financial Officer, GoTo)

That’s exactly what we did at GoTo and it’s worked out quite well. At our size I believe there are advantages to being multi-cloud, and it’s not any harder than being on a sole cloud. 

Andy Steuerman (Moderator)

What if an organization has already built dashboards and analytics for themselves and their customers on the existing cloud platform. Does OCI have similar analytics and capabilities? 

Ross Brown (Sr. Vice President, NA Cloud Ecosystem, Oracle)

Yes, we have an incredibly robust set of native Oracle dashboards and analytics tools that our customers use, but customers can also bring their own. In our data tier, we are able to pull together multiple data types into a single database and provide a data state view that feeds those analytics tools.

James White (Chief Solutions Officer, Data Intensity)

To add to that, Oracle is excelling ahead of other clouds, because they're spending time in the service space versus just basic compute and storage. There are also more modern use cases related to AI and MI, so those should be factors in any CFO’s decision-making process.