As midmarket organizations seek opportunities to leverage the cloud to transform their businesses, many are finding the path to cloud more challenging than, possibly, anticipated. To address it, Oracle will be launching two new Oracle engineered systems, optimised for SMEs, offering them an affordable solution to assist them in their transition to the Oracle Public Cloud.
In an interview with Rashi Varshney, John Foster, VP, Business Development – Systems at Oracle Asia Pacific, discussed how these extensions to the Oracle engineered systems range will provide organizations with a pathway to the cloud.
Edited Excerpts
How will Oracle’s newly launched engineered system – Oracle Database Appliance disrupt the Indian market?
Organizations of all sizes and types find it difficult, time consuming, and risky to deploy the robust database environments needed to support their enterprise applications. They are pressured to get more work done with fewer people, and to make IT a competitive asset so that they can redirect spend to activities that support innovation and add business value.
The Oracle Database Appliance helps with this. It follows Oracle’s Engineered Systems approach, which is focused on delivering complete and fully integrated systems designed around specific workloads. As a result, by deploying databases and applications in a single appliance, database administrators (DBAs) can reduce the time necessary to put a database into production from days to as little as 90 minutes. An appliance also simplifies administration for ongoing management and upgrades, especially when DBAs can rely on a single vendor for what might currently be multiple needs.
It is also important to note that the pricing model for this latest release of Oracle Database Appliance brings, for the first time, all of this performance and reliability to small and mid-sized businesses, as well as to the departments or branch offices of larger organizations.
As one user said at the products’ launch, using the Oracle Database Appliance allowed them to support significant data growth, whilst also reducing the complexity of their environment and latency, which played a role in helping the company grow.
So as you can see, the implications of Oracle’s Engineered Systems approach are quite transformative.
In addition, as organizations seek opportunities to transition to the cloud, Oracle’s new database appliances provide a bridge between on-premise systems and the cloud. They can be deployed on premises, in the cloud, or both provide a hybrid environment. That gives DBAs the option to connect more databases to the cloud for either hybrid scenarios or economical cloud-based backup. IT also derives operational savings, again thanks to the ability to deal with a single vendor for deployment and maintenance.
This out of the box cloud ready nature, gives users immediate investment protection, and simplified path to the cloud whether they are ready now or just starting on the path. In addition, in the future, organizations that plan to connect their ODAs to the Oracle Cloud can seamlessly back up their data automatically.
Please share use cases in India where Oracle sees significant opportunities for selling Oracle database appliance.
Due to new levels of simplicity, enhancements, and affordability, the latest generation of the database appliance from Oracle can help IT in a wide variety of use cases:
Development and test – With an appliance, IT can now deploy a database in hours instead of days thereby accelerating revenue by bringing new software features and capabilities to market faster with higher quality. It can also reduce operational expenses by cutting the time it traditionally takes to provision development and test environments while reducing capital expenses by using database snapshots or clones without full provisioning, thus decreasing the need for storage space.
Solution-in-a-box – An appliance consolidates hardware, software, networking, and storage in a single box for greatest efficiency. By hosting the server, storage, networking, database, and applications on a single, highly automated appliance, IT can now simplify the datacentre environment and lower costs.
Database consolidation – With a database appliance, IT can run multiple databases on the same infrastructure, meaning that IT can now simplify setup and maintenance as well as move closer to a database-as-a-service model. It can also eliminate the time needed to integrate, test, and deploy multiple databases. On the cost front, IT can reduce capital expenses by consolidating databases and maximizing utilization, and can decrease operational expenses through standardized deployments.
Backup and recovery – A database appliance provides an integrated stack with best practices, which enables database administrators (DBAs) to quickly setup a backup and recovery strategy on-premise and in the cloud to meet business service-level agreements. This enables IT to lower operating costs by offloading storage, datacentres, and administrative time to a shared cloud architecture.
How do you see adoption of the technology by SMBs in India?
We are quite confident about the adoption of ODA among SMB’s. In today’s connected world, customers want their databases and systems to be always available and always on. This holds true for every enterprise whether large, medium or small. In the past, businesses would have found it difficult to access and afford high availability hardware. Significant upfront cost, difficulty in implementation and the substantial ongoing management cost would have deterred them from even considering best of breed hardware.
Oracle database appliance addresses these challenges by offering a low cost, easy to maintain, hassle free solution. The pay as you grow licensing model for software really directly addresses the high up-front cost issue. They can buy the highly available, robust Oracle Database Appliance at a fraction of the cost that they will incur if they were to assemble a similar system.
Not only do they get to pay for what they need in terms of software licensing but also will have the capability to scale when they need more capacity, without the need to dump old hardware and migrate to a new hardware.
In addition, they do not need to have skilled resources to maintain the hardware as the processes associated with the entire lifecycle of the product from deployment to patching to diagnostics data collection and maintenance are all streamlined and substantially automated.
What are the new trends in cloud in Indian market? And, how do you see this trend among SMEs?
Cloud is opening doors for a plethora of business opportunities for Indian enterprises. The market in India is expected to reach almost $2 billion by the end of the decade especially with the increase in government spending on digitisation and growing cloud adoption among private enterprises both small and large alike. Through cloud, SMEs are leapfrogging to the digital era and capitalising on emerging opportunities. New age firms, or start-ups are launching their business ventures by moving to the cloud directly and the results are evident. In fact organisations are investing not only in Software as a Service (SaaS) but also Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
What do you think, will be the next avatar of cloud in Indian market?
While the first wave of Cloud was dominated by SaaS and IaaS, we are now seeing growing adoption of PaaS. It is allowing businesses to rapidly build and customize innovative web applications so they can revolutionize the way they work internally, deliver innovative new services to their customers fast and be able to launch new services faster. From healthcare to BFSI, organizations are achieving the fastest time to market with the lowest cost of ownership and management with PaaS.
If we look at SaaS as well, while the initial deployments began with highly contained functions like sales force automation and talent management, we are now witnessing adoption of broad set of enterprise applications including enterprise resource planning (ERP), an area long thought to be outside the envelope for enterprise IT cloud deployment. The availability of flexible cloud deployment models ranging from public cloud to private cloud to hybrid deployment models has captured the interest of businesses of all sizes.