Oracle Corp. today unveiled a new suite of services called Oracle Soar designed to make it easier for customers to migrate their applications to its cloud platform.

The move is designed to persuade customers to adopt the cloud-based Oracle Database 18c it launched last year. Oracle Soar pairs automated migration tools with professional consulting to create a comprehensive migration service.

So essentially, it’s a semiautomated service that meshes with recent efforts by the company to differentiate itself from rivals with greater automation.

Oracle Soar’s tools and services combine a discovery assessment and process analyzer with automated configuration and data migration. It also features rapid integration tools and a concierge service to ensure migrations align with customers’ best practices. “Your data is automatically extracted from E-Business Suite, transformed and loaded into Fusion ERP, and it’s now completely automated,” Oracle Chief Technology Officer and Chairman Larry Ellison said. “This system is much easier to use than the systems before it,” he added in a livestreamed presentation today to customers.

Oracle is also adding online training via the Oracle University, plus access to a customer success manager for one year after the migration is complete, to ensure everything runs smoothly as it should.

The company claims it can complete the simplest of migrations within just 20 weeks, while saving customers up to 30 percent on costs.

“It’s now easier to move from Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Fusion ERP in the cloud, than it is to upgrade from one version of E-Business Suite to another,” Ellison added. “A lot of tedious transitions that people once did manually are now automated. If you choose Oracle Soar, it will be the last upgrade you’ll ever do.”

The move comes at a time when Oracle is trying to differentiate from public cloud platform leaders such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Last year the company stressed the data-as-a-service and autonomous capabilities of its 18c database, and this year expanded its autonomous capabilities to areas such as application and data management, analytics, integration and security.

Oracle Soar is not a fully automated product, however, as the consulting services are clearly a major part of the overall package. Even so, this too helps the company differentiate Soar from rival cloud migration services such as Amazon’s AWS Migration Hub, which provides a bunch of tools for moving apps but no expert consulting.

Another rival, Workday Inc., does include consulting via its Lifecycle Deployment Program, but it lacks the comprehensive tools of Oracle’s offering, which comes with integration and migration accelerators to speed things up.

“This is absolutely unique compared to what any competition is doing in the marketplace,” Beth Boettcher, Oracle’s senior vice president of North American applications consulting, told ZDNet.

The new service can be seen as a sign that Oracle is now confident about the capabilities of its cloud infrastructure, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “Obviously can only take the second step, which is migration of apps, after the first step, which is having your cloud infrastructure ready,” he said. “With Oracle unveiling its migration service now, we can be assured that it’s confident its infrastructure-as-a-service is working.”

Whatever confidence Oracle may have doesn’t hide the fact that it’s playing catch up with its main rivals in the cloud, however. James Kobielus, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said Oracle has its back against the wall in the cloud and is far behind the likes of AWS, Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and IBM Corp. in terms of customer adoption. And that simply won’t do for Oracle, as it knows full well the cloud is where its future lies, the analyst said. As a result, he believes Oracle has clearly “fast-tracked” the development of this migration service.

“The strategic urgency that comes from having [Ellison] voice this shows that Oracle knows their future growth prospects for enterprise apps are mostly in the cloud,” Kobielus said. “So they’re pulling out the stops to get their customers into Oracle Cloud ASAP.”

Oracle said Oracle Soar is available immediately for customers using its Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft and Oracle Hyperion Planning products, and covers migration to its Oracle ERP, Oracle SCM and Oracle EPM clouds. Oracle said it plans to expand Soar to cover migrations to its Oracle HCM and Oracle CX clouds at a later date.

Image: Oracle