Oracle is ramping up its cloud push with a new migration service for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

The new Oracle Cloud Lift Services is a free cloud migration assistance offering for new and existing cloud customers. It hits Oracle's desire to meet customer demand for easier, faster, more predictable, and more reliable services to accelerate their digital migration. 

Migration assistance comes in the form of Oracle's very own cloud engineers who will talk customers through which of their applications make sense to move to the cloud, architect them, run a proof-of-concept, and offer hands-on or go-live migration support.

In a press briefing, Vinay Kumar, SVP of cloud engineering at Oracle, explained the company developed Cloud Lift to eliminate perceived barriers that could prevent customers from adopting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.  

Peeling back the layers, Cloud Lift aims to help enterprises migrate and modernize any application they run on premises to a cloud-native version that runs on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, he added. Oracle has been experimenting with Cloud Lift for the last six months with more than 100 customers who have completed this program, Kumar said.

Additionally, the company said the new migration service addresses one of the biggest pain points of cloud adoption: the costs of migration.

But that’s just half of the picture.

Cloud migration services are not only about efficiently moving workloads to the cloud, they’re also a catalyst for driving cloud providers’ market growth. Despite being a database vendor with decades of experience, Oracle is still an underclassman in a cloud market of seniors. 

Oracle has been trying for years to retrofit its image in the cloud infrastructure market to remain competitive against the likes of the cloud’s biggest players: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 

But it has quite a ways to go. Oracle still remains a “niche player” in the market, according to Gartner, well behind the leaders. Oracle’s market share sits at around 2%, based on data from Gartner, Synergy Research Group (SRG) and Canalys, and ranks no higher than sixth globally, while AWS, according to Synergy Research, holds 33% of the market.