Driving Business Value with OCI–Part 1

Understanding cloud costs can be challenging, but it's essential for maximizing value. In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham speak with Oracle Cloud experts David Mills and Tijo Thomas about how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers predictable pricing, robust security, and high performance. They also introduce FinOps, a practical approach to tracking and optimizing cloud spending. Cloud Business Jumpstart: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/cloud-business-jumpstart/152957 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:27 Nikita: Welcome back to another episode of the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and I'm joined by Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services. Lois: Hi everyone! Last week, we talked about how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings together developer tools, automation, and AI on a single platform. In today's episode, we're highlighting the real-world impact OCI can have on business outcomes. 00:58 Nikita: And to tell us about this, we have our experts David Mills and Tijo Thomas back with us. David is a Senior Principal PaaS Instructor and Tijo is a Principal OCI Instructor, and they're both from Oracle University. David, let's start with you. What makes Oracle Cloud Infrastructure the trusted choice for organizations across industries like banking, healthcare, retail, and government? David: It all comes down to one thing. OCI was built for real businesses, not side projects, not hobby apps, not test servers, but mission-critical systems at scale. Most clouds brag about their speed, but OCI is consistently fast, even under pressure. And that's because Oracle built OCI on a non-blocking network and bare metal infrastructure, with dedicated resources and no noisy neighbors. So, whether you're running one application or 1,000, you get predictable, low latency, performance every time as OCI doesn't force you into any specific mold. You want full control? Spin up a virtual machine and configure everything. You need to move fast? Use a managed service like Autonomous Database or Kubernetes. Prefer to build your own containers, functions, APIs, or develop with low code or even no code tools? OCI supports all of it. And it plays nicely with your existing stack—on-prem or in another cloud. OCI adapts to how you already work instead of making you start over. 02:39 Lois: And when it comes to pricing, how does OCI help customers manage costs more effectively? David: OCI is priced for real business use, not just the flashy low entry number. You only pay for what you use. No overprovisioning, no lock in. Virtual machines can scale up and down automatically. Object storage automatically shifts to a lower cost tier based on frequency of access. Autonomous services don't need babysitting or patching. And unlike some providers, OCI doesn't charge you to get your own data back. It's enterprise grade cloud without enterprise grade sticker shock. 03:26 Lois: Security and flexibility are top priorities for many organizations. How does OCI address those challenges? David: OCI treats security as a starting point, not an upsell. From the moment you create an account, every tenant is isolated. All data is encrypted. Admin activity is logged and security tools like Cloud Guard are ready to go. And if you need to prove compliance for GDRP, FedRAMP, HIPAA, or more, you're covered. OCI is trusted by the world's most regulated industries. Most companies don't live in one cloud. They've got legacy systems, other cloud providers, and different teams doing different things. OCI is designed to work in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Connect to your on-prem apps with VPN or FastConnect. Run Oracle workloads in your data center with Cloud@Customer. Interconnect with Azure and Google Cloud or integrate with Amazon. OCI isn't trying to lock you in. It's seeking to meet you where you are and help you modernize without breaking what works. 04:40 Nikita: Can you share an example of a business that's seen measurable results with OCI? David: A national health care provider was stuck on aging hardware with slow batch processing and manual upgrades. They migrated core patient systems to OCI and used Oracle Autonomous Database for faster, self-managed workloads. They leveraged Oracle Integration to connect ...