Oracle OpenWorld- How a small business sells world class services to the fortune 500
Pragmatyxs might be a small company, but they have some very big clients. The 15-person firm works with Fortune 500 companies to bridge the communications gap between supply chain or ERP systems and barcode and product labels.
“The labels that you see on many products must be machine readable and trackable,” explained Pragmatyxs CEO Paul Van Hout at last year’s Oracle OpenWorld. “They’re subject to audit by regulatory bodies. We have to ensure that any and all contractors are producing the same content, using the same layout, generating auditable results—it’s quite a task.”
Pragmatyxs offers 24/7 support to their clients, so their systems need to be running at peak efficiency all the time. “We might be a small company, but our clients are quite large. They have enterprise-level expectations.”
Pragmatyxs had an Oracle Database on premises, in addition to using Java for product development. They chose to migrate both to the cloud in order to reduce the amount of time that their staff spent on maintenance and support.
“The cloud lets our staff spend more time on producing our products, instead of troubleshooting IT issues,” Van Hout said.
The team also looked at Amazon, but found that Oracle offered some key advantages. “One is our comfort and confidence in Oracle technologies. We have 100 percent confidence that they’ll provide 24/7 availability.”
In addition, Van Hout found that the Amazon and Azure clouds were more consumer-oriented, and less suitable for a small business. “You go online, you pick and choose what services you want, you give them a credit card number, and then you have to configure everything. Oracle is truly a bundled package of services. Everything works together, and it’s easy to configure—we’ve taken applications that we wrote 15 years ago and deployed them to the Oracle Cloud with zero breakage.”
Van Hout also offered some advice to other SMBs when selecting a cloud provider. “Understand your cost drivers,” he said. “A lot of times, folks will look only at the monthly subscription price. They don’t think about the staffing they might need to manage the system, or the service levels offered by the provider.
“We’re a 15-person company,” he continued. “The Oracle team flew to Seattle to review our design, they helped us architecturally, they offered support as we moved to the cloud—they’ve been a true partner. They’ve provide a level of service that, frankly, is shocking, given the size of Oracle…. Oracle’s commitment to the cloud is serious. It’s much more than a marketing or sales pitch.”