Xactly Chooses Oracle Cloud To Host Its SaaS

In a big win for Oracle’s emerging cloud business, the sales performance management vendor has struck a large deal to ditch its colocation facilities around the world and replatform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Xactly, one of the industry’s top vendors of sales performance management software, said Tuesday it has selected Oracle Cloud to host its Software as a Service.

In a big win for Oracle’s emerging Infrastructure-as-a-Service business, Xactly will migrate most of its products to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including its flagship Incent sales compensation management offering.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company founded in 2005 has been delivering cloud services from private infrastructure that has rapidly expanded into more and more colocation centers around the world.

After 15 years of surging demand for those services, Xactly decided it was ready to ditch its leased data centers, Xactly founder and CEO Chris Cabrera told CRN.

[Related: New Oracle Cloud Chief Clay Magouyrk: ‘We’ve Thrown Everything Behind The Cloud’]

“We want to close those down over time, move all of it to Oracle and get out of that business,” Cabrera said. “This was a big decision for us.”

Xactly serves compensation management, sales planning, territory and quota management software to some 1,600 large customers globally who conduct millions of transactions daily through its platform.

Hosting those services on a private cloud just became unduly “expensive, time-consuming, slow and frankly not the business we wanted to be in,” Cabrera said.

When Xactly launched a search for a public cloud provider, Oracle was always in mind.

“Knowing we were built on Oracle databases, it wasn’t lost on me that certainly Oracle should be able to run Oracle databases faster than anyone else,” Cabrera said.

The company also evaluated leading public cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of which currently host some products Xactly obtained through acquisitions.

The selection ultimately came down to price-performance.

“The price-performance we found within Oracle just blew away other vendors,” Cabrera said. “This is a great thing for our company and our customers because they are going to see better performance for our software. It’s going to be a lot faster running in the Oracle cloud than we could do ourselves.”

Cabrera said his team was surprised to see such a clear benefit in adopting Oracle’s IaaS, as the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based tech giant is a relatively new entrant in the public cloud market with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Public cloud is “an emerging area for such a big company,” Cabrera said. But he was encouraged by meetings he had with top Oracle executives, including Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

“She took a big interest in what we were doing as a business,” he said. “Their commitment at the highest levels of the organization was very clear.”

As part of the multiyear deal, Oracle will augment Xactly’s go-to-market efforts through a strategic partnership involving joint marketing and selling.

“Oracle is excited to have a world-class SaaS provider like Xactly join the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure community,” Catz said in a prepared statement. “We are focused on delivering superior performance and value to our joint customers from our global cloud regions. By adopting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Xactly is improving operational efficiencies to better serve its global customers.”

Now Xactly faces a massive lift-and-shift operation.

The migration will be executed in stages, Cabrera said, with Xactly vacating a single colocation facility at a time and hoping to learn how to improve the process each step along the way.