Oracle Corp. signaled that its cloud infrastructure is ready for prime time today with launch of a new migration service for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

The new service will provide access to technical tools and cloud engineering resources that are meant to help companies to streamline the often very complicated process of moving key workloads to the cloud.

The Oracle Cloud Lift Services offering is primarily designed to address the costs and effort of cloud migration, something that Oracle said is one of the biggest pain points of any such undertaking.

The company explained that the new program gives customers a single point of contact for technical delivery and helps to eliminate any barriers that might prevent them from adopting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services. Oracle Cloud Lift Services, which is free of charge, will give customers access to Oracle’s experienced cloud engineers as well as “premier technical services” that have already been implemented previously by enterprises such as Cargill Inc., Rice University and Seattle Sounders FC, Oracle said.

In a press briefing, Oracle Cloud Engineering Senior Vice President Vinay Kumar said the main benefit for enterprises is they will be able take any application they run on-premises and build a cloud-native version of that app that runs on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.

“Don’t worry about it, we’ll do it for you,” Kumar said. “And we will also train your people and map your APIs.”

Food production company Cargill, which is the largest privately held corporation in the U.S. in terms of revenue, said Oracle’s cloud architects helped it move various critical workloads to the cloud.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offered us the performance and support we needed to get off the ground and into the cloud,” said Terence Schofield, quantitative trading technology director at Cargill.

Seattle Sounders is another customer Oracle cited. It said it worked very closely with Oracle’s engineers to overhaul its data systems and build various new cloud-native analytics tools.

“This keeps us ahead of the competition on and off the field,” said Ravi Ramineni, the Seattle Sounders’ vice president of soccer analytics and research. “With Oracle Cloud Lift Services, we’re able to accelerate our migration to the cloud, providing us with valuable hands-on expertise from Oracle’s Cloud Engineering team.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that enterprises can always do with some help to move workloads to the public cloud. As such, he said, it’s essential for cloud providers to lend their technical expertise if they want to sign up more enterprise customers.

“This is not only good news for customers but also a clear sign that Oracle’s cloud infrastructure is ready for prime time, otherwise it would not accelerate the movement of workloads to that platform,” he said. “It will be interesting to see how successful Lift has been at lifting workloads to the cloud in the next few quarters.”

Oracle Cloud Lift Services isn’t Oracle’s first stab at helping customers migrate their workloads to the cloud. It has offered a suite of services called Oracle Soar since 2018 that helps customers to move individual applications to its flagship cloud-based database.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Flickr CC