What’s it going to take to get big businesses to finally make the jump to the cloud? According to Jeff Erickson in Forbes BrandVoice on Sept. 21, Oracle has the answer.

Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison introduced Universal Credits, the new buying and consumption model for cloud services. Universal Credits give customers access to all current and future Oracle Platform Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services.

A Breakdown of Universal Credits

Here’s what Ellison means by Universal Credits:

• Through one simple contract, the customer states how much they plan to spend.
• From there, the customer can use ANY of the Oracle services on demand. There is no need for the customer to determine in advance what to buy.
• Customers choose to pay monthly or annually.
• Bring Your Own License is a new customer-friendly strategy allowing customers to apply licenses they own for on-premise software toward the equivalent, highly automated Oracle platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
• Customers with existing on-premise software can leverage that investment to use Oracle Database Cloud at a fraction of the old PaaS price.

Erickson believes that the introduction of Universal Credits will help organizations make the decision to jump to the cloud. Regarding the reluctance to date, Erickson writes, “Many have not done so because of obstacles that have forced them to choose between flexibility and lower costs.” The new Oracle structure of Universal Credits will help the organizations that have been challenged by the complexity of the cloud and the inability to rebalance spending across different services.

Customers will have the ability to “expand, move, cancel and try new things,” said Ellison. “You have complete flexibility and it gets cheaper the more you use.” Erickson believes it’s this flexibility all under one contract that makes the jump to the new cloud program easier.

Remember, Cost Effectiveness Is Paramount

Ellison said the flexibility and features—namely better performance and more software automation—of Oracle Cloud are at the same list price for platform and infrastructure services as Amazon.

Lots of variables play into the impressively low total cost of ownership customers can expect:

• Software on Oracle Cloud runs faster so that businesses can do the same work in half the time and at half the cost. “We’ve reached a point,” said Ellison, regarding Oracle’s plans to offer a guarantee that “if you move from Amazon to Oracle Cloud, your bill will be lower by 50 percent.”
• Advanced automation saves labor costs. Oracle’s autonomous database—released in October—configures, upgrades, patches and tunes itself while running.
• Automation reduces costs related to human error like forgetting to back up data or to run security patches in a timely manner.

To learn more about more automation and lower prices with Oracle Cloud, you’ll want to check out the full Universal Credit article in Forbes BrandVoice.