We get asked by customers, prospective partners, partners, and people we meet at industry events about our journey to the Oracle Cloud. Flexagon is a bit unique in that we both use Oracle’s cloud services ourselves, and through our product, we help customers better utilize Oracle’s Cloud offerings.
Stepping back to 2013…
Flexagon’s Founders spent their entire working lives in IT roles which spanned development through operations, and really understood the challenges that come with software delivery. We looked at the marketplace and saw large gaps that simply weren’t being addressed.
Fast forward to 2017…
We are a software company focused on an enterprise platform for the software delivery lifecycle automation. Flexagon’s FlexDeploy is a DevOps and Application Release Automation product which standardizes and automates software provisioning, build, deploy, test, and release processes, providing customers more visibility, automation, and controls around their software delivery processes. We live and breathe enabling truly transformational change and improving our customer’s ability to compete and win in the market.
Okay, what does that have to do with Cloud?
As I mentioned, we wear two hats when it comes to the Oracle Cloud; we are both a customer and a partner. As a Customer, we use the cloud to optimize our processes for developing, supporting, and evolving our software. As a Partner, we are enabling customers and partners to leverage the Oracle Cloud, and realize these same benefits themselves.
As a relatively small company, we need to focus our efforts on designing, implementing, and supporting our software. We are maniacal about the end-customer; solving their needs, improving their processes and their ability to better compete. That means, we need to eliminate as much time and money as possible spent on our internal infrastructure and ‘plumbing’, so we can focus our resources on delivering better solutions for our customers. When those ‘infrastructure’ activities can be managed more effectively elsewhere, it’s bad business for us to manage them ourselves. At Flexagon, we are establishing an environment which leverages our talented software engineers to do what they do best.
It boils down to speed, cost, quality, and risk.
Speed – With the Oracle Cloud, we have increased our internal speed and agility. We can spin up/down environments very fast; utilizing FlexDeploy, this can happen with the click of a button. The Cloud also allows us to reduce cycle time for FlexDeploy releases and fixpacks. Finally, the Oracle Cloud helps us reduce distractions by eliminating activities related to managing infrastructure in our data center.
Cost – We also see cost benefits with using the Cloud. With metered services, we only pay for the resources we use, and aren’t spending money when our cloud environments aren’t needed. Additionally, we can focus our time and energy on recruiting and retaining software developers, rather than having a staff to manage the internal infrastructure, or utilize our developer resources on tasks that are not fulfilling to them.
Quality and Risk – Finally, we have seen an increase in quality and a reduction in our risk of developing and supporting our software. With the Oracle Cloud, we have a reduction in system issues and outages across our environments. Plus, repeatable processes drive consistent delivery, so we know what to expect, and don’t have to spend unnecessary energy in that area.
The Oracle Cloud has helped deliver efficiencies and eliminate complexities at a time when Flexagon is growing rapidly, and resource utilization is key. We chose the Oracle Cloud because of their proven Database and Middleware components, the ability to seamlessly shift from on-premises to cloud, the flexibility and choice with we have with IaaS and PaaS, and the ability to use both Oracle and non-Oracle technologies on one cloud provider’s IaaS/PaaS offerings. We have stayed with Oracle Cloud because of their incredible partnership, and their ability to deliver on the benefits we identified and more.
If you are currently exploring Cloud options or want to evaluate the capabilities and benefits of the Oracle Cloud, we are always happy to chat about our experience and give feedback on what it could do for you.
