Case Study

Partnering to Deliver the Full Value of Oracle Standard Edition

For more than 17 years, ASPICON and Dbvisit have worked together to help organisations build Oracle environments that are both technically fit for purpose and commercially sustainable, reducing licensing costs without compromising resilience. By partnering with Dbvisit StandbyMP, ASPICON delivers a complete managed service enabling customers to confidently adopt Oracle Standard Edition while benefiting from a proven, professionally managed disaster recovery platform. Today, the partnership supports more than 100 active customer deployments and continues to drive technical innovation, long-term customer relationships and sustained business growth.

About ASPICON

Founded in 2002, ASPICON is a specialist Oracle consultancy and managed services provider headquartered in Chemnitz, Germany. The company employs 10 DBAs, 6 of them Oracle specialists. ASPICON support customers across manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, financial services, the public sector and other industries. With deep expertise spanning Oracle database administration, infrastructure, cloud, licensing, high availability and disaster recovery, ASPICON helps customers design, implement and operate secure, high-performance Oracle environments.

Successful partnerships are built on more than technology

Since becoming one of Dbvisit's first partners in Germany in 2008, ASPICON has grown one of the country's largest Dbvisit practices, supporting more than 100 active customer deployments. Over the past 17 years, the relationship has evolved well beyond a traditional software vendor and reseller model into a genuine strategic partnership. Built on agile processes, regular knowledge exchange and a proven way of working, Dbvisit has become an extension of the ASPICON team, enabling the company to focus on delivering value to its customers while knowing it has a trusted partner behind the scenes.

"What has made the biggest difference over the years isn't just the technology. It's the way Dbvisit works with us as a partner. The team is responsive, easy to work with and genuinely invested in our success. That collaborative approach allows us to focus on helping our customers while knowing we have a trusted partner supporting us behind the scenes." Dirk Melzer, Co-Founder & Managing Director, ASPICON

The partnership is collaborative in both directions. As a long-standing strategic partner, ASPICON not only delivers StandbyMP as part of its Oracle managed services offering but also provides ongoing product feedback based on real-world customer deployments. This continuous knowledge exchange helps validate new capabilities, influence future product development and ensure StandbyMP continues to address the operational challenges faced by Oracle DBAs and managed service providers.

SE and Disaster Recovery as a Unique Selling Point

Rather than treating Oracle Enterprise Edition as the default choice, ASPICON works closely with customers to determine whether Oracle Standard Edition can meet their business and technical requirements. In many cases, customers can avoid unnecessary Enterprise Edition licensing while maintaining the performance, reliability and operational capabilities their business requires.

One of the biggest barriers to adopting Oracle Standard Edition has traditionally been disaster recovery. Oracle Data Guard is only available with Enterprise Edition, leading many organisations to assume they must purchase Enterprise Edition simply to achieve production-ready resilience.

By incorporating Dbvisit StandbyMP into its managed services offering, ASPICON has removed that barrier. The company can confidently recommend Oracle Standard Edition whenever it is the right technical fit, while delivering enterprise-grade disaster recovery through a professionally managed, standardised platform that scales efficiently across more than 100 customer environments.

"Enterprise Edition shouldn't be the default decision. Our role is to help customers choose the Oracle platform that's right for their workload. Dbvisit StandbyMP gives us the confidence to recommend Oracle Standard Edition whenever it's the right fit, knowing we can still deliver the resilience and business continuity our customers expect." Dirk Melzer, Co-Founder & Managing Director, ASPICON

For many organisations, Oracle Standard Edition provides everything they need. One of the biggest challenges, however, is the lack of the native Disaster Recover, such as Oracle DataGuard, available only on Enterprise Edition. By partnering with Dbvisit, ASPICON removed that barrier, enabling their customers to realise the cost benefits of Oracle Standard Edition with a robust, enterprise-grade disaster recovery strategy.

"Oracle Standard Edition is often underestimated. In many ways it's Oracle for experts because you don't have the additional tooling available in Enterprise Edition. With the right architecture and the right disaster recovery platform, Standard Edition can support many production workloads extremely well." Thilo Solbrig, Senior Oracle DBA, ASPICON GmbH.

Right-sizing Oracle

ASPICON's approach starts with understanding workloads rather than licence editions. If advanced Enterprise Edition features are not required, the company recommends Oracle Standard Edition and designs an architecture around it. Disaster recovery then becomes an important supporting capability, ensuring customers can reduce Oracle licensing costs without increasing operational risk. This allows them to clearly differentiate themselves from their competition.

"Helping customers reduce Oracle licensing costs is only part of the story. The real value is being able to deliver a complete, professionally managed Oracle platform that combines operational simplicity, proven disaster recovery and long-term reliability. That's exactly what our partnership with Dbvisit allows us to do. "Dirk Melzer, Co-Founder & Managing Director, ASPICON

Why a Professional DR Platform Matters to MSPs

ASPICON operates, monitors and maintains the platform as part of its managed service, on behalf of their customers.

The ability for an MSP to manage solutions at scale is critical. StandbyMP provides ASPICON with a standardised, professionally supported platform that can be deployed consistently, and effectively managed across more than one hundred customer environments.

Alternative approaches exist.

1. Some organisations rely solely on backups, but RTO is poor.
2. High Availability technologies improve uptime but are not a substitute for disaster recovery.
3. MSPs can build out custom scripts, but these create complexity and require a lot of time and skill to upkeep.

For a Managed Service Provider, supporting hundreds of Oracle environments, these approaches quickly become difficult to standardise and scale. Backup-only strategies generally increase recovery times, while custom scripts require continual maintenance, testing and troubleshooting. Over time, each environment evolves differently, creating operational inconsistency and increasing support effort.

"When you're managing disaster recovery across dozens of Oracle environments, consistency matters. StandbyMP gives us a professional platform that behaves predictably every time, instead of relying on custom scripts that become harder to maintain as environments evolve." Thilo Solbrig, Senior Oracle DBA, ASPICON GmbH

Maintaining a standby database involves far more than applying archive logs. Switchovers, new datafiles, operational edge cases and ongoing lifecycle management all need to be handled reliably. StandbyMP replaces bespoke tooling with a documented, purpose-built product that delivers predictable behaviour across every deployment.

For ASPICON's engineers, this means standard operating procedures, integrated monitoring, automated standby management, streamlined switchovers and clear visibility into replication health. The result is a platform that scales operationally, allowing the team to manage many customer environments efficiently while delivering consistent service quality.

Backed by Responsive Technical Support

For ASPICON, selecting a disaster recovery platform isn't just about features. As a managed services provider responsible for protecting business-critical Oracle environments, the team also needs confidence that expert assistance is available whenever it's required.

While StandbyMP is designed to operate reliably with minimal day-to-day intervention, knowing that experienced Oracle specialists are available to provide guidance, troubleshoot issues and deliver timely software updates gives ASPICON additional confidence when supporting customers.

As Senior Oracle DBA Thilo Solbrig explains:

"The support from the Dbvisit team has always been excellent. When we've needed assistance, we've been able to work directly with engineers who understand Oracle and respond quickly. That's incredibly valuable when you're supporting business-critical customer systems."

Solution:

Right-Sizing Oracle with Oracle Standard Edition: ASPICON helps customers evaluate workloads and confidently recommend Oracle Standard Edition where Enterprise Edition capabilities are not required, reducing unnecessary Oracle licensing costs.
Enterprise-Grade Disaster Recovery with StandbyMP: By integrating Dbvisit StandbyMP into its managed services offering, ASPICON delivers reliable disaster recovery for Oracle Standard Edition, removing the need to license Enterprise Edition solely for Oracle Data Guard
Standardised Disaster Recovery for Managed Services: StandbyMP provides a professionally supported, repeatable platform with integrated monitoring, automated standby management and streamlined switchovers, allowing ASPICON to efficiently manage disaster recovery across more than 100 customer environments.
Strategic Partnership Beyond Technology: Through agile collaboration, regular knowledge exchange and responsive Oracle DBA support, Dbvisit acts as an extension of the ASPICON team, helping deliver a scalable managed service while continuously evolving the product through partner feedback.

Results:

Reduced Oracle Licensing Costs for Customers: Customers can confidently adopt Oracle Standard Edition where it is the right fit, achieving significant licensing savings without compromising business continuity or disaster recovery
100+ Long-Term Customer Deployments: ASPICON now supports more than 100 active Dbvisit deployments, with approximately one-third of customers continuing to use the solution for more than ten years, demonstrating long-term reliability and customer trust.
80% Growth in Project Revenue: By delivering complete Oracle Standard Edition and disaster recovery solutions, ASPICON increased associated infrastructure and Oracle software revenue by approximately 80% across disaster recovery projects
Differentiated Managed Services Offering: StandbyMP enables ASPICON to provide a complete Oracle managed service—from licensing advice and architecture through to disaster recovery and ongoing operations—strengthening customer retention, winning new business and creating a scalable, repeatable service model

Driving Business Outcomes

Since partnering with Dbvisit in 2008, ASPICON has grown one of Germany's largest Dbvisit practices, supporting more than 100 active customer deployments. Approximately one-third of those customers have continued using Dbvisit for more than ten years, demonstrating both the reliability of the platform and the long-term value it delivers.

The partnership has also created measurable commercial success. By helping customers realise the full value of Oracle Standard Edition without compromising disaster recovery, ASPICON has been able to expand Oracle infrastructure projects and increase associated infrastructure and Oracle software revenue by approximately 80%.

More importantly, the partnership has enabled ASPICON to deliver a complete Oracle managed service rather than a collection of individual products. Customers receive independent Oracle licensing advice, architecture design, disaster recovery, implementation, monitoring, testing and ongoing operational support through a single trusted partner. This creates a simpler experience for customers while allowing ASPICON to own the entire Oracle infrastructure lifecycle.

Rather than introducing another point solution into the environment, StandbyMP complements ASPICON's Oracle expertise and becomes part of a fully managed Oracle platform. This makes it easier for customers to standardise on a single, trusted provider for their Oracle environments, while giving ASPICON a repeatable service model that can be delivered consistently across more than one hundred customer deployments.

"StandbyMP has become much more than another technology in our portfolio. It enables us to build repeatable, enterprise-grade managed services around Oracle Standard Edition, giving our customers confidence that they don't need to compromise on disaster recovery simply because Enterprise Edition isn't the right fit." Dirk Melzer, Co-Founder & Managing Director, ASPICON

"For me, the biggest benefit isn't a single feature, it's knowing that the standby environment is doing exactly what it should. StandbyMP is a reliable workhorse. Once it's deployed and monitored, it simply gets on with the job." Thilo Solbrig, Senior Oracle DBA, ASPICON GmbH

For ASPICON, the result is more than new project opportunities. It’s a strategic partnership delivering a complete, enterprise-grade Oracle platform that strengthens long-term customer relationships, improves renewal rates and creates a level of service integration that is difficult for individual point-product vendors to replicate. Instead of competing on individual technologies, ASPICON competes on the value of a complete managed Oracle solution backed by proven processes, deep Oracle expertise and a strategic partnership with Dbvisit.

As Dirk Melzer explains:

"Dbvisit has become an important part of how we deliver Oracle managed services. It allows us to offer a complete, enterprise-grade solution that customers trust for the long term. That has helped us win new business, strengthen existing customer relationships and build a managed service that is both technically robust and commercially sustainable." Dirk Melzer, Co-Founder & Managing Director, ASPICON

Tags: DR for Oracle Cloud, Cloud implementation, ISV, OCI

Delivering Effective Disaster Recovery for our Partners

In Summary

StandbyMP is not simply another technology within ASPICON's portfolio. It is an enabling platform that allows the company to recommend Oracle Standard Edition whenever it is the right technical fit, confident that disaster recovery can still be delivered to enterprise standards.

For customers, that means lower Oracle licensing costs together with resilient disaster recovery. For ASPICON, it means a repeatable, scalable managed service built on a professional product rather than bespoke tooling, enabling engineers to deliver predictable outcomes across every customer environment.

Since implementing Dbvisit StandbyMP and integrating with OCI, CoQliQo has simplified and automated its disaster recovery capabilities. The internal management of the DR solution has empowered their technical team to respond more rapidly to incidents, ensuring business continuity with minimal disruption.