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Are your technical resources managing your infrastructure and databases, when they should be developing your software?
DSP can take away the day-to-day management and optimisation of infrastructure, cloud architecture, and database support from your technical resources, so they can go back to what they do best… developing and innovating your software.
DSP will proactively monitor and support your customers’ application platforms to ensure the highest levels of performance and availability for your customers.
This gives you the best of both worlds: your engineers have more time to innovate and develop your product while DSP works in the background as the infrastructure specialist accountable for the platform layer beneath it.
Who this service is for: Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and application providers in the UK&I whose engineers are:
- having to manage the infrastructure and database the application is deployed on.
- tasked with migrating from legacy on premise infrastructure to a modernised cloud platform.
- standing up new enterprise-grade infrastructure for a new product.
- running applications across more than one cloud.
What DSP manages beneath your software
- Cloud infrastructure
- Database and operating system management
- 24/7 proactive monitoring of platform availability and performance
- SLA-backed support services
- Ongoing health checks
- Regular security reviews
- Cost optimisation services
All managed by DSP to let the experts look after your customers’ critical application infrastructure. Letting you concentrate on what’s important to you, and focus on increasing margins.
Everything beneath your application layer becomes the responsibility of one specialist partner
DSP’s ISV service provides a single, accountable partner for managing the platform beneath your software product. We manage your OCI infrastructure, databases, monitoring and escalation 24/7, supported by industry-leading monitoring solutions and highly skilled, certified Database and Cloud Administrators.
One partner is accountable for everything beneath your application layer, 24/7
Your engineers can stay focused on the application layer, developing code, managing releases, tenants and integrations, and driving your product roadmap, while DSP takes care of the underlying platform. With one service description, one escalation path, and clearly agreed scope, access and change control, there is no grey area over who is responsible for what.
The result is a clear division of responsibility that keeps infrastructure work from competing with development priorities, giving your team more time to focus on your product and your customers.
DSP designs the platform, runs it and answers for unexpected costs
A platform that is designed properly runs faster and costs less. The costs stop surprising you and the board.
DSP designs the OCI environment for the shape of your product and tunes it for performance. It treats cost optimisation as an ongoing discipline, not a once-a-year panic. The engineers who make the design decisions are the same engineers who then continue to manage the platform and keep working towards cost reduction. As part of the standard service, cost optimisation reviews provide clear and transparent information to you and your customers, so you can see what the platform costs to run for each customer you serve, and where recommendations can make cost savings without impacting performance.
DSP will always recommend and evidence the best solution for you.
A platform your enterprise customers will accept
Your enterprise customers require service-level, security and compliance demands built into the platform that underpins your application. Confidence in the platform is part of how your product wins new business. DSP builds and operates that platform to a standard that answers them: baseline hardening, identity and access, documented monitoring, patch service levels, resilience and availability, and data residency are designed into the cloud architecture to meet your and your customers’ security and compliance requirements.
The accreditations and data-residency options your sector requires are part of your infrastructure design and build. Everything is documented if your customers need clarification.
Build AI into your solution with the right platform expertise
AI is becoming an increasingly important part of the ISV landscape, but building AI capabilities into your solution requires more than the technology itself. DSP brings deep expertise across databases, cloud platforms and AI technologies to help ISVs design and integrate the right foundations for AI-enabled applications. From preparing and optimising data platforms to supporting AI workloads and integrating services such as Oracle AI Database and OCI AI capabilities, we help you build AI into your solution securely, reliably and at scale, while you stay focused on developing the application and delivering value to your customers.
Access to one of the largest Oracle APEX development teams in Europe
If your application needs more development than your own roadmap can absorb, that additional capacity is available to you. It covers expanding what your application already does, with new modules and native extensions. It can also cover replatforming the application, which means rebuilding the application itself on newer technology.
Independent recognition:
The scale behind it:
Common hosting-related issues on the board’s agenda
- Development and innovation time and costs
- Infrastructure and cloud costs
- Performance, availability and security of the platform
Development time leaks into infrastructure management, not product development
Time spent keeping the lights on and day to day platform and database management is time that could be spent on application innovation and AI solution design. In a software business the roadmap is the business, and infrastructure work is the quietest way to slow it down. Cost and architecture decisions that get made under time pressure, without the depth of technical expertise, can result in challenges in the immediate future as to the platform’s suitability both technically and commercially. This applies particularly to application providers standing a cloud platform up for the first time and the first customer deployment.
Cloud costs start raising boardroom questions
The initial and ongoing cost of any cloud platform is a number the business increasingly asks for, and most software vendors struggle to produce it on demand. For many ISVs cloud costs surface in a cost-of-sales line before they are fully understood, managed and under control. For vendors putting a product into the cloud for the first time, the cloud infrastructure costs that are being set right now, in the architecture, may not be what the costs are several months down the line. As the product scales, the cloud platform beneath it becomes a larger share of cost of sales, which the board has a keen interest in understanding so they can ensure maximum profitability of the services being delivered. A platform that grew without oversight and discipline is one of the easiest ways for margins to be impacted.
Ageing infrastructure starts setting your timetable
Traditional on-premise infrastructure typically has a life span, which is usually published from a supported status point of view. Oracle Database also has a specific release schedule, with every release having its own supported timelines. If your product runs 19c, for example, then those supportability timelines are set years in advance. That has turned a background question into a live decision about how the platform should be designed and run next. If your product runs on infrastructure you own, the trigger could be the next hardware refresh or the end of a data centre contract. The decision lands the same way and on the same date. At the same time, enterprise customers push service-level and security demands down onto a platform team that is already at capacity.
All these pressures come back to one engineering question. The question is whether the infrastructure beneath your product is designed, costed and run for what it now carries, and what it needs to carry in the future. While that question sits with your internal technical teams, answering it takes time they would otherwise spend on your product. A holistic platform review, of either current on premise infrastructure with an eye on migrating to a cloud platform or a review of your existing cloud infrastructure, allows you to size an optimised platform, technically and commercially, for now and for estimated future growth.
Four ways software vendors work with DSP
Put your product’s platform on the cloud, and let DSP run it
DSP handles on premise to cloud migration for established software products. It moves a product off infrastructure you run yourself and onto cloud infrastructure. For a product that has not shipped yet, DSP stands the platform up from scratch. Either way, DSP then manages everything beneath the application layer around the clock: the cloud estate, the databases, the monitoring and the escalation. Handover is staged, and what it takes from your team is stated stage by stage before you commit. Built for revenue-bearing estates, run as a co-managed service that gives your engineers their roadmap time back.
Find out what your platform really costs, and get the architecture right
An indicative platform cost per customer, on one page, alongside an OCI readiness and architecture map for your platform. The review turns spend you cannot currently break down into a number you can stand behind.
Tune the database beneath your product on evidence rather than guesswork
When a software product slows down, the database is usually why, and your customers notice before your dashboards do. Fixed-scope health checks and performance tuning for the Oracle databases beneath software products.
Build new modules in Oracle APEX, commissioned separately from the managed service
Development for native extensions and new modules, scoped and quoted as its own engagement. You ask for it, you decide what gets built, and the application layer stays yours. Where DSP already runs the platform beneath your product, the new modules run on that platform rather than on a second system to maintain.
Also available to software vendors
- Cloud security and compliance: a security setup that helps you meet your, and your clients’, security and compliance objectives.
- Oracle licensing for software vendors: ensure compliance and optimised commercial models for your Oracle licence estate.
DSP opens doors into Oracle for software vendors
Route to market is something software vendors want from Oracle and partners. It works best when someone who knows the organisation in your industry is able to open the right doors. DSP has a long-standing relationship with Oracle and can help you maximise the commercial opportunity by being able to navigate the Oracle organisation, map the accounts, and introduce you to the right people, then set up the meetings so you have those conversations in collaboration. Where your product fits a sector DSP already serves, DSP can open doors with its own customers too. DSP can also help you list on Oracle Marketplace, which is worth doing if your product is built for a specific industry.
DSP opens doors and navigates Oracle for you. The selling into your market stays with you, because you know that market and DSP does not. It is a useful part of working with DSP, not the reason for it.
On demand. In this webinar, DSP's James Peck, Phil Brown and Development Services Director Simon Greenwood walk through the Oracle ISV Accelerator. They cover the commercial path onto OCI, what working with Oracle looks like in practice, and how to tell whether your product qualifies.
Start where your problem is
Find the line that sounds like you, and take the direct route in.
“Move our product from on premise to the cloud and have someone run, optimise and manage it”
Managed cloud services →“Understand and map our current cloud costs, with optimisation a key focus”
Book a platform review →“Database performance is impacting application performance”
Database health checks → Database performance tuning →“Answer our security and compliance questionnaire”
Cloud security and compliance → The residency question is also answered plainly in the FAQ below ↓“Ensure compliance and commercial optimisation of Oracle licensing”
Oracle licensing for software vendors →“Build or extend our product on Oracle APEX”
Oracle APEX for software vendors →Book a platform review
One partner for the whole layer beneath your product, and one conversation to find out what that would look like. One page of output: what the platform costs per customer (indicative), how it should be designed for OCI, and, if you run Oracle Database, where the 19c support timeline will impact you. That session allows DSP to put a realistic onboarding plan in front of you, with your team's time commitment stated stage by stage rather than discovered later. Run by a senior Oracle engineer who has seen platforms like yours, from a partner Oracle named its Best-in-Class global technology and cloud partner for 2025. Whatever you decide next, the page leaves with you.
Prefer a person to a form? Talk to James Peck, DSP’s specialist for independent software vendors.
Common questions from software vendors
What does DSP do for software vendors?
DSP is the single accountable partner for the platform layer (cloud infrastructure, database and operating system) beneath your software product. It moves an existing product onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, whether that means coming off infrastructure you run yourself or standing the platform up for the first time. DSP designs and costs that platform, then runs it and the databases around the clock as one accountable service. Around that core it also handles technical and commercial optimisation, Oracle licensing, resiliency and availability, security and compliance, and ongoing performance. Your engineers keep the application layer; everything beneath it is DSP’s job.
Does DSP compete with our product?
No. DSP builds nothing that competes with a customer’s software product. DSP is a partner, not a competitor: it runs the platform beneath your product and is structurally aligned to your product’s success, so there is no large integrator planted inside your roadmap. APEX development happens only where you commission it, on the modules you specify in line with your application development plans.
Where is our data processed, and by whom?
Your data lives in the cloud region you choose. Oracle operates UK regions, with UK data-residency options where your sector requires them. Equally, for customers based in Europe or worldwide, we can deploy in any of the Oracle data centres, with standardised commercial models in place. The managed service is delivered through a hybrid model: senior Oracle engineers in the UK and DSP’s delivery centre in India, working around the clock behind documented access controls and clear accountability. Processing locations and residency commitments are written into the service description, so you answer your customers’ questionnaires from the contract rather than from memory.
What does the platform review include?
A one-page view: an indicative platform cost per customer, an OCI readiness and architecture map, and, where you run Oracle Database, where the 19c support timeline leaves you. It is run by a senior Oracle engineer and takes one conversation. The output is yours to keep, whatever you decide afterwards.
Do we have to move to OCI to work with DSP?
No. Some software vendors engage DSP for the database layer only, some for licensing, some for health check services. The review is scoped to OCI readiness, and the recommendation still follows the evidence: where a workload runs better somewhere other than OCI, DSP says so.
How does DSP charge for this?
The managed service is a recurring subscription, priced against what DSP actually manages: the infrastructure footprint, the number and size of the databases, the environments covered and the service levels you need. Migration and one-off project work are quoted separately against a defined scope. Fixed-scope pieces such as a database health check are priced as fixed-scope pieces. The review comes first for exactly this reason, so the commercial model is built on real shape rather than a list price.
How long does onboarding take, and what will it cost us in team time?
Onboarding is staged rather than open-ended: discovery, monitoring integration, agreed runbooks, a shadow-running period, then full service. Your team’s time commitment is stated for each stage up front. The review gives DSP enough to put a realistic plan and timeline in front of you rather than a generic one.
What are the service levels, and who owns an incident at 3am?
Service levels are agreed per environment in the service description before go-live: response and escalation commitments, plus recovery point and recovery time objectives that match what each environment and customer requires in line with their business requirements.
Coverage is 24/7 and proactive, delivered by senior engineers in the UK and DSP’s delivery centre in India. Monitoring is continuously assessing the environment for issues, allowing potential problems to be identified and addressed before they become incidents wherever possible. When an alert or incident occurs, it is assessed against the agreed service levels, prioritised according to its impact and assigned to a named engineer who takes ownership through to resolution.
If an incident requires additional expertise, it follows a defined escalation path to the appropriate technical specialists, with clear communication and handover between teams. The incident remains owned throughout the process, so responsibility does not get passed between teams or left unclear during a critical event.
Whether an issue occurs during business hours or at 3am, there is a clear process, a named owner and the right technical expertise available to respond, recover and keep your platform running.
How does the co-managed split work in practice?
DSP manages where our expertise lies: the cloud and database layers. The application tier stays with the specialist, which is you. This partnership model gives clear lines of responsibility and a fully supported environment. Your engineers keep the application layer: code, releases, tenants, integrations and the roadmap. DSP manages everything beneath it as the single accountable partner. Scope, access and change control at the boundary are agreed in writing before go-live.
Who is responsible for security, us or DSP?
Security of the platform layer DSP manages is DSP’s responsibility, documented in the service description: baseline hardening, identity and access, monitoring scope and patch service levels. Security of the application layer stays with your engineers, because that is the layer you own. The split is written down, so each layer has a named owner when an enterprise customer’s questionnaire arrives. Security is ongoing and collaborative.
The fuller compliance detail is on the cloud security page.