This situation is understandable: when customers rely heavily on your application, a major change to the way you deliver it to them can seem a risky and disruptive strategy. But at the same time, with your customers starting to see the advantages of cloud in other parts of their businesses, many will be demanding similar benefits from the applications they’ve bought from you. And this means migrating them to a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model using the cloud.

The benefits of moving to the cloud Moving your existing customers’ applications to the cloud will enable you and them to enjoy the well-understood benefits of using cloud infrastructure. For your customers, this includes:

• Scalability and flexibility: Near-infinite room to grow their application as demands increase, or decrease capacity at quiet times

• Business agility and responsivness: They can quickly try out new capabilities around your application, thanks to the speed at which you can add capacity to the cloud environments

• More attractive pricing models: By eliminating the need to purchase infrastructure to run your application, you can move your customers onto more attractive operational-expenditure-based pricing models, with low up-front costs and the ability to flex in response to changing demand

• Minimize inefficiency: Much on-premises hardware is under-used, particularly in test and development environments, where utilization is sometimes less than 10% . Cloud helps minimize this inefficiency, meaning your customers will only be paying for infrastructure they’re actually using

• Data center reductions: Migrating existing customers’ applications to the cloud can enable them to reduce their data center footprint and cost

• Reduce the cost of infrastructure management: Moving your customers to a SaaS-based model should reduce the amount of infrastructure their technology teams need to look after, meaning they can redeploy resources onto higher-value work

• Improve physical security: Cloud data centers are incredibly secure, typically more so than an on-premises data room

Why the Oracle Cloud is best for Oracle-based apps

While any organization’s overall enterprise cloud strategy should make use of a range of cloud providers, when it comes to applications built on Oracle, we’ve found that Oracle Cloud is almost always the best solution.

This is because it provides a range of benefits, including:

• Enterprise-grade technology: Oracle offers various flavours of Infrastructure as a Service, including bare metal provisioning, dedicated compute and regular compute. Moreover, unlike some cloud providers, Oracle gives you access to the underlying infrastructure in both dedicated and multi-tenanted environments, even for Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility and enables you to implement appropriate foundations for your customers’ specific needs

• Performance: Choose an appropriate level of cloud performance for your application, from standard compute to high-end Exadata machines

• Ease of migration: There’s no need to significantly re-architect your Oracle-based application or its platform when you migrate it to the Oracle cloud. This is because Oracle’s cloud is specifically engineered to work with Oracle databases. If you choose a different cloud provider for your Oracle-based application, it could require major re-architecting increasing risk and costs

• Security: You can implement your customers’ enterprise-grade security in the same way they do on-premises, thanks to the ability to access the underlying infrastructure

• Scalability: Oracle Cloud can scale vertically and horizontally to support large enterprise-grade workloads

• Ease of management: Your Oracle Cloud estate can be managed using the same Oracle enterprise tooling you’ll already be familiar with from Oracle Database

Why now is the time to embrace cloud

As the data center equipment that underpins your customers’ applications reaches end-of-life, they’ll be looking for an alternative to the major capital expenditure of buying new hardware. By migrating their instance of your application to the Oracle Cloud, this is exactly what you’ll provide. Oracle’s cloud offering has matured significantly in the past few years and now has a data center footprint covering the whole globe. We’ve helped ISVs move existing customer implementations to the cloud and achieve significant savings and lower total cost of ownership. For your customers, this can free up resources to spend on innovation and other products and services from your business.

For you as the ISV, the savings can be reinvested in intellectual property and to accelerate cloud adoption and wider business growth. All of this can help boost your EBITDA, company share price and valuation. Perhaps most crucially of all, as we touched on above, cloud adoption by ISVs is still in its infancy, which means that embracing it now can give you and your customers a distinct competitive advantage.

Before your start your cloud journey

The benefits are tantalizingly close, but given the risks involved in radically changing the way your customers use your software, you as the ISV need to plan the process carefully. In our next piece, we’ll reveal nine things you need to address before you embark on the journey to move your existing customer base to the cloud.