To help customers optimize the value of their technology investments, Oracle has announced Oracle Platinum Services. The Oracle Platinum Services are available at no charge as part of a standard support contract to customers with either Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8, Oracle Exalogic X2-2, and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 Servers with Exadata storage, Sun ZFS Storage or Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 Storage.
Oracle Platinum Services are intended to provide customers with remote monitoring, faster service response times and quarterly patch updates deployed directly to their systems, ensuring high availability in mission critical IT environments. To access Oracle Platinum Services, customers install a patented, secure monitoring gateway that will allow Oracle to deploy quarterly updates on their behalf.
Oracle says that with the secure connection to Oracle, customers can decrease the cost and complexity of supporting their IT environment, while easing administration, ensuring high availability and increasing security with 24x7 Remote Fault Monitoring in which covered components are monitored for faults remotely around-the-clock, providing a single point of accountability for the Oracle stack. In addition, Oracle will respond to any severity 1 issue within 5 minutes and will either restore the system or escalate the issue to product development within 15 minutes. A 24x7 escalation process and hotline will enable customers to be routed to specialized product experts for immediate access to advanced support and development engineers. The service also provides remote quarterly software updates and patch deployment, enabling customers to get fast access to improvements and new innovations, ensuring better system performance. Oracle will apply software updates to customer products on behalf of the customer four times per year, or once per quarter, through the remote connection.
According to Larry Abramson, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services, there are four things happening which have enabled Oracle to offer these services. One is the Oracle's concept of the engineered system. Because those systems are designed to work together and supported together, there has been a change in how Oracle can support those services. Two, is the standard configuration of devices which enables support that in the past would have been much more difficult or even impossible to achieve. Three is the customer expectation that when they use engineered systems or the cloud that there will be integrated support that transcends all levels, and addresses their service rather than just the components, and that support will be preventative and not just reactive. And, four, Abramson says, is that traditional support services are converging and merging with traditional monitoring and management services. With Platinum Support, Oracle has created unique intellectual property which is deployed through a gateway, and enabling Oracle to extend its support all the way into the customer environment.
“Those four things combined with the fact that we own each of the components of our stack, enables us to deliver what we think is the highest level of service in the industry,” says Abramson.
Initially the Platinum Services will be targeted at the Oracle engineered systems, and will be expanded to more products.
In conjunction with the Platinum Services announcement, Oracle is also introducing additional paid services in Oracle Advanced Services, which is the parent organization of Platinum, says Abramson.
The first is Advanced Monitoring and Resolution for Platinum which enables customers to extend Platinum support to non-Platinum environments, such as BusinessSuite, as well as additional competitor and customer products.
The second is end user performance monitoring which extends Oracle monitoring all the way to the edge of the network, to the actual user experience.
And third is a solution support center, which is already used by many Oracle customers. It enables large, complex organizations to have people work with them permanently onsite or remotely.
For more information, go to www.oracle.com/us/support/index.html.