Facing spiraling data-center costs, a pressing need to continue to expand internationally, and a relentless need for better performance, Medallia has chosen Oracle as a preferred cloud infrastructure partner to enable greater experiences for Medallia’s customers.
Medallia is a leading player in the surging market for customer and employee experience, and the strategic partnership with Oracle is intended to significantly accelerate Medallia’s growth potential, according to Steve Vierra, Medallia executive vice-president channels, alliances, and global partnerships.
A huge factor in Medallia’s decision to add Oracle to its list of preferred cloud infrastructure providers was the superb performance levels of Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure, Vierra said.
“If you think about the scale of Medallia, we talk in terms of terabytes of data—we have massive scale. We deal with many hundreds of millions of data records and trillions of transactions and events for our customers. Some of our bigger customers have 40,000 unique active users and hundreds and hundreds of millions of end-user customers and transactions.”
To ensure that Medallia could continue to deliver superb customer experiences while its business is growing and expanding rapidly, Vierra said, it needed an additional infrastructure partner that could handle those skyrocketing requirements.
“When you get into trillions of transactions, if our customers didn’t have an enterprise-grade and highly scalable platform that could mirror Medallia, then those customers wouldn’t have the same reach and capability, and their customers wouldn’t have the type of experience that they’ve come to expect and receive from Medallia,” Vierra said. “That was a high hurdle for every cloud provider that we talked to—they had to be able to deliver a similar or even better experience than our customers and our customers’ customers are getting today.”
The partnership comes as the large and fast-growing CX market takes on even greater significance with employees in every type of business demanding more personalized experiences as work-from-anywhere becomes an essential option. In such an environment, companies are looking eagerly for any fresh and meaningful insights that will help them be perceived as an appealing destination for world-class talent.
And on the customer side, the past 18 months have made us all more demanding and have boosted our expectations—and our requirements—for great experiences that transcend products and services.
All of that points to the importance of being able to handle the “massive scale” that Vierra mentioned on a few occasions.
“We operationalize the feedback companies get from their customers and employees, and that extends beyond traditional employees because the workforce could include the gig economy, it could be a partner, it could be an agent. It could be anything that could be touching the customers and impacting the experience they have,” he said.
“We capture those signals, make sense of them with our industrial grade platform, and apply AI and machine learning to uncover patterns, identify risks, and predict behavior. You’re looking at why customers buy certain products or services versus another, how they feel, what they like, what could be better, what should be different, what would make them spend more money and be more loyal. These are all these signals that get aggregated, and we look for those patterns.
“So if we can help our customers gather all that feedback from customers and employees, then we think Medallia can help our customers build the best companies and by putting all that together, the customers and the employees help build great brands.”
In that context, Oracle’s powerful OCI capabilities—particularly speed, performance, security, and global reach—are perfect matches for Medallia.
“If you look at what OCI is becoming, where it’s come from and the robust nature of the platform, we’re confident that our customers are going to get a great experience on the platform,” Vierra said.
“OCI is going to help us break down some barriers geographically. It’ll help us expand in some markets where we need scale and scope where we might not have a presence today. And it’s about also giving customers choices,” Vierra said of the multicloud approach Medallia has adopted.
“I think the days of a single cloud strategy dictating terms to your customers are long gone because customers want a choice. And so this is an opportunity for us to expand and give customers a great choice.”
Oracle’s rapid buildout of 30 cloud regions across the globe—founder Larry Ellison is fond of saying Oracle now has more data centers than Amazon Web Services—will allow Medallia to target and move into key markets more rapidly.
“It lowers our cost of entry or barrier to entry in certain markets,” Vierra said. “With the kind of scale Oracle has in various markets around the world, we get to step in with truly enterprise-grade technology and we’re ready to roll on day one.”
For more details on the Medallia-Oracle partnership, you can check out this press release.
Many top ISVs, including Medallia, have chosen to run their businesses on OCI. ISVs need cloud partners who deliver great price-performance, along with security, flexibility with enterprise scale, and predictable costs, which they are able to get with Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure. Among many others, Cybereason, Manhattan Associates, Vertex Inc., and WorkForce Software are seeing tremendous value from OCI.
This article is brought to you by Oracle.
