Oracle Corp. is trying to persuade e customers to ditch their on-premises licensing agreements and move to its subscription-based cloud infrastructure instead with a promise to help alleviate their support services costs if they do.

The new Oracle Support Rewards program announced today will provide rewards in the form of support services for all customers that make a new commitment to buy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, the company said.

Under the program, Oracle technology license support customers will earn at least 25 cents of Support Rewards for each dollar of OCI Universal Credits they buy and consume. And customers that have Oracle Unlimited License Agreements can save even more, since they’ll earn rewards of 33 cents for each dollar they spend. That means, the company said, that unlimited-license customers with a support bill of $500,000 could eliminate the bill entirely by migrating $1.5 million of workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The Support Rewards program is aimed at creating more value for its existing customers, and as a result it will make adoption of its OCI services more cost-effective. The company likened the offer to frequent-flyer miles, saying the Support Rewards will be automatically added to customer’s accounts each month and can be applied at any time.

“Almost all our customers have the potential for significant savings,” Oracle founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said in an online Oracle event today.

The credit reporting agency Experian Plc said it has already benefited from the program because it uses Oracle for many of its core systems on-premises. “As we continue to adopt cloud-based solutions, Oracle Support Rewards makes it much easier for us to choose Oracle Cloud for the future of these systems,” said Mervyn Lally, Experian’s global chief enterprise architect.

The new program is the latest in a series of announcements Oracle has made this year that position its cloud infrastructure as a much more tempting proposition for customers. In March, the company announced its Cloud Lift service to help companies move their workloads to Oracle’s cloud.

Then in May, it made its Arm-based OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances generally available, becoming only the second cloud provider to offer compute infrastructure based on Arm Ltd.’s central processing unit designs. Earlier this month, it announced a number of new “Always Free” services for developers that want to test its cloud infrastructure in the real world.

International Data Corp.’s cloud and edge infrastructure analyst Dave McCarthy said the Support Rewards program is yet another way in which Oracle is differentiating its cloud offerings. “Oracle Support Rewards combined with flexible and transparent pricing are essential in attracting new business and accelerating adoption of OCI,” he said.

There will likely be more news to come on the cloud front in future. Oracle Chief Executive Safra Catz said during an earnings call last week that the company plans to double its investment in cloud computing to almost $4 billion over the next fiscal year — a vow that knocked its stock price down the next day.

“We are confident that the increased return in the cloud business more than justifies this increased investment, and our margins will expand over time,” Catz told investors.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Open Grid Scheduler/Grid Engine/Flickr