Oracle Strategy: Large Backlog and New Government Contracts Boost Vendor’s Long-term Outlook

What is Oracle’s overall business strategy?

Oracle’s current business strategy centers on streamlining customer success efforts, enhancing partner collaboration, and expanding multicloud infrastructure. By consolidating its services under the Oracle Customer Success Services (CSS) umbrella, the company has improved life cycle support for clients, reduced overlap with systems integrators, and equipped partners with tools like the Cloud Success Navigator to enhance implementation and renewal outcomes.

 

NetSuite mirrors this with innovations like SuiteSuccess Anything as a Service for SMBs, emphasizing productized success and faster time to value. Simultaneously, Oracle’s deep industry expertise continues to differentiate it in vertical markets where SaaS vendors have struggled to gain traction. Its growing multicloud presence — especially through alliances with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — supports a global push for regional availability and compliance, allowing customers to run Oracle databases more flexibly across platforms.

 

Oracle is also aggressively targeting the public sector and international markets through partnerships with government-facing ISVs like Palantir and Adarga, deploying their AI solutions in Oracle’s compliant cloud regions. The company plans to invest heavily in expanding its infrastructure in key regions like the U.K., reflecting its plans to establish a broader a geographic and strategic footprint.

Oracle’s Go-to-market strategy

Launching a single customer success organization has helped Oracle foster more collaboration with partners, innovate more quickly with new services, and drive renewals and expansions among existing customers.

 

Enterprises: Consolidating under Oracle CSS has helped Oracle better focus on serving clients across the life cycle, including the initial preparation, implementation and managed services phases. CSS has also helped make room for partners to better engage with Oracle around Day 1 services, from implementation to go-live, and as a result, we suspect Oracle Consulting’s overlap with systems integration (SI) partners is greatly diminishing.

 

In addition to launching new white-glove support services, CSS is focused on giving partners the right tools to advance Oracle deployments. The biggest example is Cloud Success Navigator, which recently became generally available to Fusion customers for free. The tool was built with partners and includes features to guide customers and partners through best practices, offer education on new feature releases, and drive more collaboration between partners and Oracle’s own customer success resources to keep customers’ Fusion projects on track. In our view, Customer Success Navigator is an example of how Oracle has evolved and is now more willing to share best practices, and in many cases IP, with partners.

 

SMB: NetSuite is similarly making enhancements to its customer success portfolio, with a new Anything as a Service (XaaS) edition within Suite Success. Suite Success is part of NetSuite’s approach to productize customer success with prebuilt templates, modules and guided best practices to reduce time to go-live and improve product renewal rates, two leading customer success metrics tracked by SaaS vendors.

 

Vertical: While many SaaS vendors have tried and failed to successfully launch “industry clouds,” Oracle has long offered its own suite of bespoke industry applications, often sourced through acquisition but increasingly built from the ground up. Based on feedback we have heard from many global systems integrators (GSIs), Oracle partners appreciate steps the company is taking to deliver specific solutions designed to deliver value to the customer, and Oracle’s industry prowess complements many GSIs looking to put industry “wrappers” around SaaS solutions.

Geographic: Quickly expanding the availability of its database services in the cloud regions of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a top priority. By the end of 2025, Oracle’s databases are expected to be available in an additional 13 Azure regions across all geographies.

 

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Oracle’s partner strategy

Oracle has been expanding work with government-led ISVs, hosting their AI software in certified OCI regions both at home and abroad

As evidenced by its recent partnership with Palantir, Oracle has been working with ISVs that sell into governments to host their software in OCI government regions. In early 1Q25 Oracle partnered with Adarga, a U.K. company that offers an AI-based intelligence tool for public sector agreements. As part of the new agreement, Adarga’s platform — Vantage — will be deployed in Oracle’s U.K. Government cloud, which complies with local government requirements.

 

The Vantage platform reportedly leverages an ecosystem of over 35 AI models to support defense agencies’ mission requirements in real time. Oracle has been heavily investing in the U.K. market and has been gaining traction with the U.K. government, which recently deployed the entire Fusion back office as part of an ongoing vision to shift toward a shared services model. More recently, Oracle announced plans to invest $5 billion over the next five years in new U.K.-based infrastructure.

 

As is the case with Azure, Oracle is expanding its database alliance, adding new regional availability so customers can run Oracle databases in Google Cloud data centers outside the U.S. In January Oracle announced it will expand into eight additional Google Cloud regions over the next year, including in international markets like Japan and India. Aside from entering new markets, both companies also plan to double capacity in existing regions where Oracle Database@Google Cloud is supported, including London; Frankfurt, Germany; and Ashburn, Va. Additionally, the companies are adding cross-region disaster recovery so data can be replicated on a standby database in a separate Google Cloud region.

 

In the past we have discussed how Oracle is leveraging the IoT networks and APIs from telcos to power the Oracle Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP). This quarter, Oracle partnered with Vodafone Business in a similar capacity, progressing with its strategy of working with telcos to expand the reach of the Oracle Communications portfolio and help customers connect more devices and networks to their cloud services. Specifically, Oracle will leverage Vodafone’s Global SIM, which gives access to over 580 networks, and Vodafone’s IoT network, which reportedly delivers connectivity in more than 180 countries.

Oracle’s resource management strategy

Now that all 3 hyperscalers are on board with its multicloud database strategy, Oracle focuses on expanding global reach within their data centers

With the Oracle Database@AWS service entering limited preview in 4Q24, Oracle is now officially delivering its database services across all hyperscale clouds. The company’s big focus now is on expanding the availability of its services in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and GCP data centers. The Microsoft Azure alliance is the most mature, offering the most availability, but in January Oracle announced it will expand availability to eight additional Google Cloud data centers while doubling the capacity in existing regions where the service is available, including London; Frankfurt, Germany; and Ashburn, Va. It is still early days for the Oracle Database@AWS service, with availability limited in the AWS’ U.S. East region, but both companies will make services available in additional global data centers throughout the year.

 

Leveraging the data center infrastructure of its peers through the multicloud database strategy could give Oracle the flexibility to invest capex dollars more strategically. Additionally, to support Oracle Alloy and sovereign cloud deployments in APAC, Oracle is staffing operations teams in markets like Japan and Thailand.

What is Oracle’s AI strategy?

Following in the footsteps of its peers, Oracle gives SaaS customers a way to build, orchestrate and manage AI agents as part of an ongoing value paradigm shift

TBR’s research shows that customers want to use AI agents out of the box but also want to build their own agents using enterprise data. Many SaaS vendors have recognized this value shift and, to stay competitive, are launching new AI capabilities designed to help customers build and manage their AI agents; Salesforce’s launch of Agentforce and Workday’s new Agent System of Record platform are top examples.

 

Though later to the market, Oracle has similarly recognized this trend. In 1Q25 Oracle launched AI Agent Studio, a new tool that allows Fusion SaaS customers to choose from among the 50-plus prepackaged agents that already exist within the Fusion suite and build entirely net-new agents leveraging prebuilt templates based on natural language prompts. A big differentiator for Oracle will be that Fusion customers can use the AI Agent Studio tool for free, which continues to suggest that Oracle’s AI strategy is all about delivering more automated experiences that will drive adoption and upgrades from within the legacy install base. Oracle’s AI pricing and level of integration between the applications and the underlying database and infrastructure will continue to be core differentiators, but AI Agent Studio was a long time coming and a step Oracle needed to make to keep pace with the market.

 

On the infrastructure side, expanding the availability of multicloud databases is one of Oracle’s biggest strategic priorities. Microsoft is Oracle’s most established multicloud database partner, and between the Oracle Database@Azure service and interconnected regions, this alliance serves over 450 customers. As such, Oracle will be expanding more widely with Azure over the next 12 months, as Oracle databases become available in 18 additional Azure regions, bringing the total Oracle Database@Azure region count to 26.

 

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