A Retrospective: Managed Services 2017-18

Claremont’s financial year wrapped up in April, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to stop and look back at the past year for our Managed Services practice.

Our continued growth has seen us supporting an interesting and varied range of customers. This has included: a local authority with almost 20 production Oracle databases, mostly using 2 or 3 node RAC; new hosting customers bringing bespoke systems, data warehouses and Oracle E-Business Suite to our Cloud platform; and a multi-national telco where we provide functional as well as DBA support for their Oracle E-Business Suite instances.

That growth is clear from our statistics in the infographic, but what matters to me is that our SLA adherence and customer satisfaction have never suffered as a result of our growth. In fact, last year we closed more tickets than were opened and achieved high levels of SLA adherence, even though we provide SLAs for resolving incidents (which most Oracle managed service providers won’t offer). But I’ve met customers who tell me they weren’t happy with previous providers despite them not breaching SLAs so it’s the customer satisfaction score that really matters to me and that hit record levels.

There’s growing awareness in the marketplace about the challenges of licensing and supporting Oracle software (regardless of whether it’s database, middleware or E-Business Suite) on Cloud platforms.  The fact that 3 years ago we implemented our private Cloud on Oracle VM and ensure it is hard partitioned has always been important to us, but we now find many customers ask about license compliance and efficiency. Unlike the likes of Amazon and Azure, Claremont’s Cloud does not require customers to purchase additional licenses (or use fewer hosting resources) than when hosting in-house. This is one of the drivers behind the continued growth and investment in our Cloud, and it now has over 2,000 vCPUs available to our customers. Tiny compared to the global Clouds, but our customers consistently report we deliver higher levels of service and lower costs than previous suppliers; combined with certainty around Oracle license compliance that has proved a powerful combination and customers have moved to us from in-house hosting as well as other 3rd party hosting such as Oracle Managed Cloud Services (OMCS).

We are really proud of the results we have achieved and I would like to thank my talented team for their hard work (after all, in a services business it is all about the people) and our customers for their continued support. It’s exciting to work with such successful and varied, industry-leading organisations.

We are dedicated and passionate about providing continued service excellence to all of our customers, year-on-year and look forward to working with new customers this year. Please contact me if you would like to discuss how our approach to Oracle hosting and managed services is different.