Maximise the power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Proud partner:

Secure migrations, sovereign compliance, and deep cost optimisation from an Oracle Partner that knows the ecosystem inside out — with strategic leadership by Oracle ACE Director Matt Mulvaney, based in London.

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Led by Oracle ACE Director Matt Mulvaney

Every APEX Workflow project is supervised by Matt – one of only 17 Oracle ACE Directors in the world – based in London. aOur UK operations are led by Matt Mulvaney – one of only 17 Oracle ACE Directors in the world – based in London. All OCI architectures are supervised directly by Matt, ensuring every engagement meets the highest institutional standards and aligns with UK regulatory requirements. Pretius Ltd is a fully registered UK entity (Company No: 147557660), governed by English Law.This gives your architecture a direct line to Oracle's product roadmap and the highest institutional standards.

Matt Mulvaney

Pretius Ltd CEO / London-based leadership

♠ Oracle ACE Director — 1 of 17 worldwide

What this means in practice

Oracle Database on AWS or Azure is subject to a 2:1 core factor licensing penalty that OCI eliminates entirely. For a 64-vCPU instance running Oracle Enterprise Edition, this difference exceeds $1.5M in licensing cost on a single instance.

We delivered a 53% cloud cost reduction in 7 months for a regulated insurance client migrating from AWS to OCI. Audited outcome, not a vendor projection.

Zero-Downtime Migration (ZDM) for mission-critical Oracle databases, including RAC clusters and multi-terabyte Pluggable Databases (PDBs).

DORA, FCA, GDPR, KNF, EBA-compliant architectures designed from day one — not retrofitted after a regulatory inspection.

Official Oracle Partner. 7 Oracle ACEs on the team. ISO 27001 certified.

What we do on OCI

Eight services, one team. The full Oracle stack — from database through application layer — means a single engagement can address infrastructure, licensing, compliance, and application architecture together.

01 Cloud health check and TCO audit

The starting point for every engagement.

We audit your Oracle Database licence estate, map it against your current deployment topology, and build a five-year TCO comparison between OCI, AWS, and Azure using your actual workload profile.

What you get:

Full 2:1 core factor exposure on AWS or Azure, precisely quantified
BYOL opportunity on OCI for your existing licences
A vendor-neutral cost model that the CFO can take to the board

Fixed scope. Two to four weeks. No obligation to proceed.

02 OCI architecture and landing zone design

We design the OCI environment from the ground up: tenancy structure, compartment hierarchy, IAM policies, VCN topology, FastConnect or VPN connectivity, and the Oracle Database service configuration that fits your workload. Autonomous Database, Database System, or Exadata Database Service — depending on what your applications actually require.

High availability and disaster recovery use Oracle Data Guard with cross-region replication and automatic failover configured to your RTO and RPO.

For DORA-regulated UK clients, the DR architecture satisfies DORA's testing and documentation requirements from the design phase — before a regulatory inspection finds the gaps.

03 Zero-Downtime Migration (ZDM)

ZDM is Oracle's own tooling. The migration runs Data Guard replication between the source and OCI target, validates the target against defined acceptance criteria, and executes a switchover that involves seconds of connection interruption rather than hours of downtime.

Delivered for:

Multi-terabyte production databases
RAC clusters with native topology preserved on OCI
Exadata to Exadata Database Service with Smart Scan optimisations preserved
Cross-version migrations using Oracle GoldenGate

Every migration includes a tested rollback procedure executable in minutes.

04 Regulatory compliance architecture

DORA, FCA, GDPR, KNF, EBA, BaFin. These are architecture requirements, not documentation tasks.

Standard implementation includes:

Maximum Security Zones
Oracle Vault for encryption key management
FastConnect private connectivity
Cloud Guard for continuous security monitoring
Audit logging configured for regulatory inspection evidence

For EU and UK Sovereign Cloud deployments:

OCI regions with verifiable physical isolation, EU/UK-only personnel access controls, and the technical verification mechanisms that satisfy a regulatory audit. Verifiable technical isolation — not a contractual commitment to data residency.

The FCA, KNF, BaFin, or EBA documentation package — including risk assessment, data residency documentation, business continuity plan with tested scenarios, and exit strategy — is delivered as a standard component of the engagement.

05 FinOps and cost governance

In unmanaged cloud environments, 25 to 40 percent of cloud spend is typically waste: idle reserved instances, over-provisioned compute that was never right-sized, orphaned storage, and egress costs that were not in the original TCO model.

FinOps governance covers:

Monthly cost analysis with allocation by workload and business unit
Reserved capacity planning reviewed annually
Right-sizing reviews of provisioned instances
Auto-scaling policy implementation
Cost anomaly alerting

OCI's pricing eliminates several AWS and Azure cost drivers structurally: no per-GB egress charges at scale, simpler reserved capacity model. Ongoing governance is what sustains the savings.

06 Managed OCI services

Your team focuses on business applications. We run the infrastructure.

Managed services include:

24/7 monitoring with Oracle Observability and Management tools
Incident detection and response with defined SLAs
Oracle Database performance management:AWR analysis, execution plan management, wait event investigation
Patch management on a defined schedule
RMAN backup management with tested recovery
Data Guard health monitoring
Annual DR testing with documented results for DORA and FCA reporting

The same team that built the environment operates it. No knowledge transfer to a separate support organisation.

07 Cloud-native modernisation on OCI

Oracle Autonomous Database eliminates patching, backup, tuning, and scaling from DBA operational overhead
Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) for container-native application deployment with automated scaling and CI/CD
OCI AI services, including OCI Data Science, Oracle Database 23ai vector search, and OCI Generative AI — built on your own Oracle Database data
Oracle APEX Service on OCI with auto-scaling and managed infrastructure

Pretius covers OCI infrastructure and Oracle APEX development in the same team.

Application and infrastructure migrations are designed together, not handed off between vendors.

08 Oracle Forms and APEX modernisation on OCI

Oracle Forms applications need to be addressed as part of any OCI migration. Two paths:

Containerisation – Forms to OCI using WebLogic. Existing functionality preserved, cloud infrastructure gained.
Modernisation – Forms to Oracle APEX. Cloud-native application on Oracle's low-code platform, replacing the Forms interface while preserving the underlying business logic.

Pretius is one of the most experienced Forms-to-APEX migration teams in Europe.

That practice runs alongside the OCI infrastructure capability in the same team, so a Forms application and the Oracle Database it depends on can be addressed in a single engagement.

The situations where we deliver the most measurable value

You run Oracle Database on AWS or Azure and have never conducted a formal Oracle licence audit. The 2:1 core factor exposure is typically larger than expected and almost always discovered for the first time in a Health Check.

Your cloud bills are higher than projected when you migrated, with no clear path to reduce them.

You are subject to DORA or FCA oversight, and your current cloud architecture was not designed to satisfy its DR testing, third-party risk management, or incident reporting requirements.

Your Exadata or on-premise Oracle server hardware support contracts expire within 12 to 18 months, and the hardware refresh vs. cloud migration decision needs to be made now.

You have Oracle workloads spread across multiple cloud providers and on-premise environments after a merger or acquisition, with no unified licensing governance or cost visibility.

You migrated to AWS or Azure 18 to 36 months ago and are experiencing higher costs, performance below on-premise, and growing technical debt.

You attempted a lift-and-shift migration and lost Exadata Smart Scan or RAC native clustering in the process.

Your compliance or security team cannot produce audit evidence that would satisfy an FCA, DORA, or internal regulatory inspection.

Why Oracle workloads perform better and cost less on OCI

This comparison is specific to Oracle Database workloads. For non-Oracle workloads, AWS and Azure may be the better choice. For Oracle Database, the platform differences are structural and material.

Criteria

AWS and Azure

OCI

Oracle licence core factor

2:1 on every physical core

1:1

BYOL economics

BYOL at 2:1 — existing licences cover only half the requirement

Full BYOL at 1:1. Existing Exadata licences at near-zero incremental cost

RAC support

Not native. Requires third-party replication without equivalent capability

Native. Same topology and failover as on-premise

Exadata Smart Scan

Not available. Exadata-optimised workloads run without storage cell offload

Fully available via Exadata Database Service

Network performance

Noisy Neighbour effect. Performance variability on shared hosts

Off-box network virtualisation. I/O separated from the compute host

Egress costs

Charged per GB. Common source of unmodelled TCO overage

Included at scale. No per-GB egress charges

Sovereign cloud

Software overlay on shared global infrastructure. Contractual, not technical isolation

EU/UK Sovereign Cloud with verifiable physical isolation and EU/UK-only personnel

DORA compliance

Requires significant additional tooling and configuration

Maximum Security Zones, native Data Guard for tested RTO/RPO, OCI third-party risk documentation

Autonomous Database

Not available.

Available natively. Eliminates the majority of DBA operational overhead

The Oracle technologies we run, migrate, and optimise on OCI

Generic cloud partners operate OCI infrastructure. Pretius operates the Oracle stack that runs on it.

Oracle Database

Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition 2, Oracle Database 23ai. AWR-level performance tuning, RMAN backup and recovery, and patch management on Oracle's CPU and PSU schedule.

Exadata and Exadata Database Service

On-premise Exadata to Exadata Database Service migration preserving Smart Scan optimisations. Full BYOL TCO modelling for existing Exadata licences. RAC-to-OCI migration using Oracle's recommended tooling.

Real Application Clusters (RAC)

Native RAC support on OCI is one of the platform's most significant technical advantages over AWS and Azure. We design and migrate RAC configurations, preserving active-active topology and automatic failover behaviour.

Oracle Data Guard

HA and DR configuration across OCI availability domains and regions. Fast-Start Failover with Observer placement. Annual DR tests with RTO/RPO documentation for DORA and FCA reporting.

Oracle Autonomous Database

Migration from Database System to ATP or ADW, where workload patterns support it. Eliminates patching, backup, tuning, and scaling from DBA operational overhead.

Oracle APEX on OCI

APEX Service on OCI or self-managed APEX on OCI Compute. Auto-scaling, managed infrastructure, integration with OCI IAM and networking. Combined with Forms migration capability, this covers the full Forms-to-APEX-on-OCI path in a single engagement.

Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)

Containerisation of Java and other application workloads. Automated scaling, rolling deployments, CI/CD via OCI DevOps pipelines. Infrastructure as code using Terraform for OCI.

Oracle GoldenGate

Logical replication for cross-version migrations, heterogeneous source environments, and low-latency replication between OCI and on-premise.

OCI Security Services

Maximum Security Zones, Oracle Vault, Cloud Guard, Bastion service, and the network security architecture required for regulated UK environments.

OCI AI and ML Services

OCI Data Science, Oracle Database 23ai vector search and AI integration, OCI Generative AI. Built on your own Oracle Database data rather than generic training sets.

53% cloud cost reduction in 7 months. Regulated insurance sector. Audited.

The situation:

A leading European financial services organisation was running Oracle Database workloads on AWS. Infrastructure costs were escalating with no optimisation path. The architecture did not fully satisfy the data residency and compliance requirements of the insurance sector. Change was necessary, but it had to maintain continuous regulatory compliance throughout the transition.

What we did:

We audited the full Oracle licence estate and cloud footprint, identifying the complete 2:1 core factor exposure on AWS, the BYOL opportunity on OCI, and the architecture gaps against the organisation's regulatory obligations.

We designed a migration from AWS to OCI using ZDM tooling, with Maximum Security Zones and GDPR-compliant data residency configured from day one.

The result:

Cloud cost reduction

months

From audit to outcome

0 hours

Unplanned downtime

Day one

Full regulatory compliance

The combination that produced the result: eliminating the 2:1 core factor penalty, exploiting BYOL on OCI, right-sizing compute instances to OCI's architecture, and eliminating AWS egress costs. Actual cloud spend before migration compared to actual cloud spend after migration, for a production Oracle workload in a regulated European environment.

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Forms to APEX Migration Services

The Oracle licensing rule that most AWS and Azure customers discover after they have already committed

Oracle's licensing policy requires two Oracle Database processor licences for every physical core on AWS and Azure. On OCI, the factor is 1:1.

The numbers – for an enterprise running Oracle EE on a 64-vCPU AWS instance:

Licences required on AWS:

128 processor licences (2:1 factor)

Licences required on OCI:

64 processor licences (1:1 factor)

Oracle EE list price:

approx. $25,000 per processor licence

Difference on this single instance:

more than $1.5M

Across an enterprise Oracle estate, the cumulative annual exposure can reach tens of millions of pounds.

What most organisations do not know

The penalty is embedded in Oracle's licensing policy documents and applies regardless of how the AWS or Azure instance is configured. It is not a negotiating position and does not depend on instance size or region. Most organisations discover it in a Health Check — after committing to multi-year cloud contracts.

BYOL on OCI

Organisations with existing Oracle Database licences — including Exadata — can run those licences on OCI at a 1:1 factor, obtaining cloud infrastructure at near-zero incremental licensing cost. Most organisations with significant Exadata investments are not exploiting this because no one has modelled it for them.

The Cloud Health Check quantifies your specific exposure in two to four weeks, at no obligation.

The Health Check: answers the questions your CFO and CIO need before approving a platform decision

The most common reason Oracle cloud migrations are deferred is not that the migration is too risky. It is that no one has produced an accurate, vendor-neutral comparison of what staying put costs versus what moving would cost and deliver.

Fixed scope. Two to four weeks. Most clients use the outputs regardless of whether they subsequently migrate.

Oracle licence audit

Systematic analysis of your Oracle Database licence estate — processor licences, Named User Plus, SE2 versus EE, options and packs — mapped against your current deployment topology.

Output: full 2:1 core factor exposure on AWS or Azure, BYOL opportunity on OCI, and for Exadata clients, specific sizing of the Exadata Database Service opportunity.

Current cloud cost analysis

Review of billing history decomposed by Oracle workload: compute, storage, networking, data transfer, support.

Output: egress costs, idle reserved instances, and over-provisioned compute surfaced in detail.

Five-year TCO comparison

Structured model comparing your actual workload profile against OCI, AWS, and Azure. Licensing at the correct core factor for each platform, plus compute, storage, networking, managed service costs, and the one-time migration investment.

Output: net present value comparison that supports a board-level decision.

Architecture assessment against regulatory obligations

Review of your current cloud architecture against DORA, FCA, GDPR, KNF, EBA, or equivalent requirements applicable to your organisation.

Output: identified gaps between the current architecture and what a regulatory inspection would require.

Migration roadmap

Workload-by-workload sequencing, ZDM configuration requirements for each database, dependency mapping between application tiers and databases, and cutover procedure with rollback steps at each stage.

Output: a plan that the Head of Database Operations can review and validate.

If the numbers do not support OCI migration for your situation, the Health Check says so. Several clients have used the TCO model to negotiate improved terms with their existing cloud provider rather than migrate.

DORA changed what cloud architecture compliance means for UK and EU financial services

The Digital Operational Resilience Act entered into force across EU financial services organisations in January 2025. It imposes specific, enforceable requirements on cloud infrastructure that go beyond what most organisations had built toward before the final requirements were published. UK financial services firms operating in EU markets – or subject to equivalent FCA resilience expectations – face the same pressures.

Disaster Recovery with tested and documented RTO/RPO

DORA does not accept DR plans as evidence of DR capability. It requires tested DR with measured recovery time and recovery point objectives, documented and reportable to regulators.

Many organisations have a Data Guard or replication configuration on paper but have never tested switchover under production load with recorded results. We design OCI DR architectures with annual testing procedures that produce the documentation format DORA and the FCA require.

ICT third-party risk management with technical depth

DORA requires documented due diligence on cloud providers that goes beyond reviewing contractual terms: where data resides, who can access it, what the exit path is, and what concentration risk the provider creates.

We provide OCI-specific third-party risk documentation built for inclusion in ICT risk registers, based on OCI's own published technical controls and our documented deployment configurations.

Incident detection and reporting within defined timeframes

DORA specifies timeframes for detecting, classifying, and reporting significant ICT incidents. We configure OCI Cloud Guard and OCI Monitoring with detection rules and notification workflows aligned to DORA's incident classification and reporting timeline requirements.

Digital operational resilience testing

DORA requires periodic testing of digital resilience, including threat-led penetration testing for significant institutions. We build OCI environments with the security architecture that penetration testing programmes can validate: Maximum Security Zones, least-privilege IAM, encrypted storage, and network segmentation.

FCA, KNF, BaFin, EBA, and national regulators

The documentation package for an FCA, KNF, or BaFin cloud assessment includes: risk assessment covering technical, operational, legal, and strategic risks; data residency and data flow documentation; business continuity plan with tested scenarios; exit strategy with implementation timeline; and evidence of ongoing monitoring and compliance review.

This documentation package is delivered as a standard component of OCI architecture engagements, based on templates developed through real regulatory submissions and inspections.

Oracle cloud environments we regularly inherit – and what is wrong with them

1. Oracle Database on AWS, performance below on-premise

The most common complaint. The Noisy Neighbour effect on AWS creates I/O and CPU variability absent from dedicated Oracle infrastructure. For write-intensive OLTP workloads, this produces latency spikes that did not appear in the migration POC but emerged under production load.

Fix: OCI's off-box network virtualisation physically removes network and storage I/O from the shared compute host, eliminating the interference at the architectural level.

2. RAC configured with third-party replication instead of native clustering

AWS and Azure do not support Oracle RAC natively. Organisations implemented third-party replication as a workaround, which does not support transparent application failover, adds licensing cost, and introduces additional failure modes.

Fix: native RAC deployment on OCI with the same topology and behaviour as the on-premise environment.

3. Exadata Smart Scan disabled in the cloud

When Exadata environments are migrated to non-OCI clouds, the Exadata storage layer is lost. The workload runs, but without the storage cell offload optimisation that was a primary reason the organisation purchased Exadata.

Fix: OCI's Exadata Database Service preserves Smart Scan along with IORM policies and storage indexing.

4. Cloud costs higher than on-premise, no clear cause

Typically a combination of: compute sized conservatively at migration time and never right-sized; egress charges not modelled; data transfer costs between availability zones; and AWS or Azure reserved instance complexity not actively managed.

Fix: right-sizing, reserved capacity optimisation, and architectural changes to reduce inter-zone data transfer typically recover 20 to 40 percent of monthly spend.

5. BYOL licences not exploited on OCI

Existing Oracle Database licences — including Exadata system licences — have direct BYOL applicability on OCI at a 1:1 core factor. The licence value is already paid for. The infrastructure cost on OCI for those workloads is the compute and storage cost only.

Fix: licence audit identifies the unexploited BYOL opportunity specifically.

6. Security architecture built for convenience, not compliance

IAM policies with administrative permissions granted during migration and never reviewed; network security groups with permissive ingress rules; storage volumes without encryption at rest.

Fix: OCI's Maximum Security Zones prevent these configurations by design. Resources created within a Maximum Security Zone cannot violate the defined security policy.

7. DR document exists, DR capability does not

A documented DR plan describes what would happen. A tested DR capability has happened, with measured results. For DORA-regulated and FCA-supervised organisations, only the latter satisfies regulatory requirements.

Fix: Data Guard configurations with tested failover procedures and results documented in the format of DORA's reporting requirements.

Why Pretius UK for OCI

Oracle partner with full-stack Oracle depth

Oracle Partner status requires certified headcount and demonstrated delivery. But what the certification does not capture is the depth of Oracle-specific knowledge required to design OCI architectures that actually exploit the platform's advantages.

The 2:1 core factor modelling requires Oracle licensing expertise. Native RAC design on OCI requires Oracle clustering architecture knowledge. Exadata Database Service configuration requires an understanding of Oracle's storage cell offload technology. Data Guard configuration for a DORA-compliant RTO requires Oracle HA architecture expertise. These are Oracle skills, not generic cloud skills.

7 Oracle ACEs – including 1 ACE Director based in London

Oracle ACE designation is Oracle's formal recognition of technical mastery and community contribution. It is awarded through a documented nomination and approval process. Pretius has 7 Oracle ACEs covering database, APEX, and cloud architecture — making it one of the most Oracle ACE-concentrated delivery organisations in Europe. Matt Mulvaney, Oracle ACE Director, leads from London.

Full Oracle stack in one team

Database architecture, Oracle APEX development, Oracle Forms migration, and OCI infrastructure delivery in a single team. An OCI partner that covers only the infrastructure layer will migrate the database but cannot advise on the Oracle APEX applications that depend on it, or the Oracle Forms applications that need to be addressed as part of the migration. We scope and deliver the complete Oracle landscape migration in a single engagement.

Delivered results in production

53% cloud cost reduction for a regulated insurance client — audited, not projected.
TVN Warner Bros. Discovery (Player.pl) VOD platform on OCI, 60 million monthly viewers.
Zero-downtime migrations of production Oracle databases, including RAC and multi-terabyte PDB environments.

Local UK accountability – ISO 27001, GDPR-native, IR35-compliant

ISO 27001 certification is a procurement prerequisite in regulated-industry vendor assessments. GDPR compliance is structural in our EU-based operations. Pretius Ltd is a fully registered UK entity governed by English Law, providing local contracts and 100% IR35-compliant B2B engagement — critical for UK organisations navigating off-payroll working legislation.

Instant enterprise scale

300+ in-house salaried specialists. Senior squads deployable within 2 weeks. No recruitment delays, no IR35 exposure. The same team that designs your OCI architecture operates it post-migration — no knowledge transfer to a separate support organisation.

By the Numbers

Oracle Partner

Recognised expertise in the Oracle ecosystem

Oracle ACEs

On the team (including 1 ACE Director)

+ years

Of experience with the Oracle technology stack

In-house specialists

+ projects

Successfully delivered

% of clients

Become long-term partners

Cloud cost reduction achieved – audited

ISO 27001 certified · UK GDPR compliant · DORA ready · IR35-compliant engagement

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Our process

Phase 01

Discovery & TCO

We begin with a comprehensive analysis of your current technology estate — whether it resides on-premise or on another cloud platform. Our experts conduct a deep-dive audit of your resource consumption, licensing arrangements (including CSIs and existing contracts), and performance requirements to calculate the precise and transparent Total Cost of Ownership for migrating to OCI, giving you a clear financial roadmap.

Phase 02

Architecture design

Based on the TCO analysis and your specific regulatory requirements, we design a highly secure, performant, and future-proof Landing Zone on OCI. This design is meticulously crafted to ensure compliance with your security mandates, data residency requirements (sovereignty), and all industry-specific standards — FCA, DORA, GDPR — from the very beginning.

Phase 03

Proof of Concept (optional but recommended)

Before committing to a full-scale migration, we conduct a focused Proof of Concept. We migrate a carefully selected, non-critical workload to the designed OCI environment. This step validates the security and compliance architecture and confirms the migration methodology to ensure a predictable outcome.

Phase 04

Migration (ZDM)

We execute the full-scale migration using proven Zero-Downtime Migration techniques and advanced tooling. This approach ensures that your mission-critical applications and day-to-day business operations remain completely uninterrupted throughout the entire transition, minimising risk and guaranteeing business continuity.

Phase 05

Optimisation

Following the successful migration, we conduct a thorough post-migration review and optimisation phase. This involves right-sizing all provisioned OCI instances, fine-tuning resource allocation, and implementing automated scaling policies — ensuring immediate performance improvements and delivering the promised long-term cost savings.

Flexible project approaches

01 Co-creation

Our engineers work alongside your in-house team from day one. Knowledge transfers continuously. When the project ends, your team understands the new OCI environment deeply enough to own and operate it independently.

03

02 Dedicated development teams

You have a clear scope and a clear destination. We provide a cross-functional team — architects, engineers, QA, DevOps — that operates as an extension of your organisation. You maintain strategic control; we bring the execution capacity.

02

03 Comprehensive project delivery

You hand us the project, we deliver the outcome. Defined scope, defined timeline, defined budget. Optional managed services SLA after go-live.

04 Team augmentation

You have an internal team running the migration but need specific expertise — Oracle DBA, OCI architecture, Java, or APEX. We slot specialists into your team for as long as you need them. Fully IR35-compliant.

What our Clients say

Bilal Ramadan

CEO – Munich Re HealthTech

The solution is secure, scalable, and compatible with most technologies used by our clients. It's also much cheaper to maintain, which was an important success criteria. Application licensing costs were largely reduced.

Adam Kasperowicz

CIO – VAN group

The new e-VAN system has become an innovative tool and work environment. The development team allows us to use the potential of the latest trends and technological solutions: web & mobile development, responsiveness, integrations, low-code, and cloud computing.

Marijn van den Berg

Team Manager – Sweco

Thanks to our collaboration with Pretius, we've made it easier for our clients to utilise Obsurv. Customising the application modules to their specific needs is now much quicker and more efficient. For us, this means shorter customer onboarding times and lower costs.

Zuzanna Świętorzecka

Head of Bancassurance – BNP Paribas

The communication throughout the project was very good as Pretius provided us with a Project Manager who always addressed our needs. The most impressive thing was how quickly the team developed a fully working, market-ready software solution for us.

Marek Samujłło

CIO – Emitel

What I like the most, as CIO, is that the people at Pretius care not only about technology itself but rather about how this technology can help your company achieve business goals.

Richard Coombes

Head of Engineering – Equals Money

They allowed us to deliver against our 20/21 roadmaps, launching new products to market and increasing company revenue by over 70%.

Gordian Ratajczak

Product Owner – Neuroflash

They effectively assess a project and allocate the matching resources, which gives confidence that you are in good hands. Issues and tasks are handled proactively and communication stands on a firm ground of mutual understanding and goals. You are not hiring an external resource, but you are gaining a team member.

Konrad Gałecki

Digital Manager – Philip Morris Distribution

Usually, you can either get a high-quality software solution or have it developed fast. However, thanks to choosing the right technology, the Pretius team was able to provide us with a fully working platform in a relatively short time.

FAQ

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation. It is designed to run complex, mission-critical workloads and offers a high-performance, secure, and compliant environment. OCI is particularly optimised for Oracle's own technologies — Exadata, Forms, APEX, and Databases — and provides features like data sovereignty and agility, positioned to help customers break free from legacy technical debt.

Oracle's sovereign cloud refers to an OCI architecture designed to meet strict local data residency and regulatory compliance requirements for industries where data residency is non-negotiable.

Key aspects include:

Data Residency: Solutions are designed to ensure data never leaves specific legal jurisdictions — for example, by leveraging EU Sovereign Cloud regions — to meet strict data sovereignty requirements relevant to UK and EU-regulated organisations.
Regulatory Alignment: Architectures are meticulously crafted to align with major regulatory standards such as GDPR, FCA requirements, DORA, banking and finance regulations (KNF, EBA), and stringent healthcare standards.

Yes, we specialise in multi-cloud and cloud-to-cloud migrations, particularly for Oracle workloads where OCI often offers substantially better performance and price ratios due to the elimination of the 2:1 core factor penalty.

Not necessarily. We can "lift and shift" Forms using WebLogic on OCI — existing functionality preserved, cloud infrastructure gained. We also offer modernisation services to convert Forms to Oracle APEX for a true cloud-native experience. Both paths are available and can be addressed in the same engagement.

We review your current Oracle CSIs and contracts to recommend the most cost-effective path — whether that is BYOL (Bring Your Own Licence) or converting to OCI-included licensing. The Cloud Health Check quantifies your specific BYOL opportunity within two to four weeks.

Oracle's licensing policy requires two Oracle Database processor licences for every physical core on AWS and Azure. On OCI, the factor is 1:1.

For an enterprise running Oracle Enterprise Edition on a 64-vCPU AWS instance, the difference exceeds $1.5M on that single instance. The full exposure across an estate depends on your edition, number of vCPUs, and whether you have existing licences that could be exploited under BYOL on OCI. Our Cloud Health Check quantifies your specific exposure within two to four weeks, at no obligation.

ZDM is Oracle's own tooling for migrating Oracle Databases to OCI with zero planned downtime. The approach: establish the OCI target, synchronise data using Data Guard physical replication (or GoldenGate for cross-version migrations), validate the target environment, execute the switchover — seconds of connection interruption rather than hours of downtime — and decommission the source. We have delivered ZDM for multi-terabyte production databases, RAC clusters, and Exadata environments. Every migration includes a tested rollback procedure executable in minutes.

Yes, for two reasons. First, the 2:1 core factor is an ongoing cost that compounds across the remaining contract term. The break-even point depends on your specific exposure, which the Health Check quantifies. Second, most AWS and Azure contracts cover compute, not Oracle licences. The licence cost is separate and can be restructured independently of the infrastructure contract.

DORA requires: tested DR with documented RTO and RPO; ICT third-party risk management with technical depth; incident detection and reporting within defined timeframes; and digital operational resilience testing. Many organisations that migrated Oracle workloads to AWS or Azure before DORA's requirements were finalised are now operating cloud architectures that do not satisfy these requirements. We design OCI environments that satisfy DORA requirements by design — DR configurations with tested failover, Maximum Security Zones, and OCI-specific third-party risk documentation for inclusion in ICT risk registers. The same principles apply to FCA operational resilience requirements for UK-regulated firms.

OCI's EU Sovereign Cloud is physically located in EU member states, operated by EU-based personnel, with technical access controls preventing non-EU Oracle staff from accessing customer environments. This provides verifiable technical isolation — not just a contractual commitment to EU data residency. It is required when your regulatory obligations — FCA, KNF, BaFin, ACPR, or sector-specific frameworks — require you to demonstrate through technical evidence that specific data has not traversed non-EU infrastructure.

Yes. We offer two paths: containerisation of Forms to OCI using WebLogic, which preserves existing functionality while gaining cloud infrastructure; or modernisation to Oracle APEX, which replaces Forms with a cloud-native application. We are one of the most experienced Oracle Forms-to-APEX migration teams in Europe. That practice runs alongside our OCI infrastructure capability in the same team.

Cloud Health Check: two to four weeks
Proof of Concept (one non-critical workload):additional two to four weeks
Full production migration (straightforward Oracle Database workload): three to six months from design to go-live
Complex environments (RAC, Exadata, application tiers, regulatory compliance architecture): six to twelve months for the full programme

The Health Check establishes a cost model for the full engagement as part of its deliverables.

Yes. Every specialist is a full-time, salaried Pretius employee. By engaging Pretius Ltd — our registered UK entity — you receive a clean, risk-free B2B partnership that eliminates all IR35 off-payroll working exposure. No contractor arrangements, no hidden risk, no administrative burden.