The multi-year deal between Deutsche Bank and Oracle underscores how much enterprises have to consider their prior investments and the bottom line when building a cloud strategy. “We have a very heavy investment in Oracle from a software perspective,” Gordon MacKechnie, group head of technology infrastructure for Deutsche Bank, told ZDNet. “This was a way for us to best leverage that software investment with a stable platform that gave us a whole bunch of new features and functionality.” Deutsche Bank has a very public public-cloud strategy that leverages the Google Cloud Platform for developing application logic in the cloud and Microsoft Azure for its productivity tools. Its investments in Cloud@Customer are “complementary and in some respects an enabler of that strategy,” MacKechnie said. The company landed on this option after seeking a way to modernize and consolidate its existing database systems. Over four to five years, the company will move “many thousands of databases” – more than 95 percent of its systems – to Cloud@Customer while upgrading to the latest versions of Oracle Database. It will move to a standardized platform to support critical systems like trading, payments processing, risk, and capital planning and regulatory reporting. Deutsche Bank also plans to leverage Oracle’s autonomous capabilities. “The scale and mission-criticality of the systems involved mean we’ll be taking it carefully going forward,” MacKechnie said. While it’s a huge undertaking, he added that “as migrations go, it’s not one of the more complex.” Given that customer base, it’s no surprise that Oracle’s pitch is “to continuously and always protect your investment in technology.”
