It’s raining agreements in the cloud sector, and the latest is the one that Oracle entered into with AT&T. Under the terms of this agreement, AT&T will move its thousands of large-scale internal databases to Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

This deal gives a win-win scenario for both companies. For AT&T, this deal gives access to Oracle’s cloud services portfolio and all the tools that come with it. Specifically, this agreement will allow AT&T to optimize the scheduling and dispatch of its field technicians.

Currently, AT&T employs more than 70,000 field technicians and it wants to make the most of their services. To optimize the skill and availability of these technicians, it wants to combine its own machine learning and big data capabilities with Oracle’s cloud technology. Through this combination, AT&T plans to increase the overall productivity and efficiency of its workers and ensure that technicians arrive on-time for service requests.

Right now, that’s one of the complains that its customers have, as the company gives a two-hour window for its technicians arrival time. That can be too large a time gap and customers can plan their day better if they know the exact arrival time of technicians. This is why AT&T wants to provide accurate time slots and want to ensure that its technicians arrive at the given time.

This time accuracy is dependent on the work duration of each job. For example, if a technician starts his first service at 9 AM and takes half an hour to finish it. Add another 15 minute commute time, so the next service can be only at 9.45 AM. Now, if the system predicts inaccurately that the technician can finish the job in 20 minutes, then he will not be able to keep up the next appointment. This is why both the duration of the job and the overall schedule of the technicians have to be considered, and AT&T is doing just that with advanced technology.

This is a significant agreement for Oracle too, as it’s looking to expand its cloud-based offerings. Such deep collaborations with existing clients provides more opportunities for Oracle to extend its offerings. Interestingly, Oracle entered into agreements with VMware and Equinix as well, on the same day. These three agreements can greatly boost Oracle’s revenue and more importantly, give it a firm hold in the competitive cloud market.

One significant trend that we’ve been noticing is the flexibility that companies like AT&T have when it comes to entering into agreements with cloud providers. For example, AT&T has earlier deepened its commitment with both Amazon Web Services and IBM to handle cloud services for networking, mobility, security, analytics and the Internet of Things. This is a heartening trend as companies can pick and choose the provider they want for multiple divisions or services, without having to rely on a single company to provide it all.

Overall, this agreement is expected to give rich benefits to both Oracle and AT&T, and hopefully will improve service and offerings to AT&T’s end customers.

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