Michael Counsel, Vice President – Enterprise Architecture, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation, explains to Heena Jhingan how the Cloud Application Foundation (CAF) helps enterprises achieve more with cloud
Tell us a bit about Cloud Application Foundation and why it is such a big bet for Oracle?
Oracle has constructed a Cloud Application Foundation which acts as a building block to help companies accelerate their efforts of development and delivery of applications on cloud environments — private or public. It is an integrated, flexible middleware platform built on standards-based technologies for portability. It brings together key industry-leading technologies: Oracle WebLogic Server for Java EE; Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data Grid; Oracle Tuxedo for C/C++/COBOL; Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder; and Oracle Traffic Director for load balancing capabilities.
CAF provides enterprises with choice across conventional systems and cloud environments. It is optimized to run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud for on-premise cloud deployments and is available on third-party clouds for increased flexibility and scalability.
Today, there are many cloud providers in the market and most of them have the best of the breed application challenges, something that started happening in the late 1990s. What was happening in an organization was that various applications were going through various vendors, integrating all those system break ups was a complex problem, involving a lot of investment.
In the cloud era, similar problems started emerging, because companies started buying from different cloud providers. However, there needs to be some consistency and this is another area that Cloud Application Foundation targets. A lot of people did not see or predict these hurdles coming.
But Oracle did and we have been doing integration for our applications for years. Oracle has also integrated all the acquisitions that we have been undertaking over the last several years. We have brought all the applications together. We know how to solve the integration issues better as we have solved the problem for ourselves, as well as for our customers, who have extensively deployed our integration solutions. The good part is, Cloud Application Foundation lets customers run designs built on on-premise or on the cloud and include them as per the business needs.
What has been the response to the platform globally? What kind of customers are opting for these platforms?
Oracle has every industrial capability to offer to the market that cloud requires. We offer the maturity of developmental tooling in areas like WebLogic Server, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Access Management capability, Oracle database management and access management capability and we developed the tooling that is based on Java. All these components have actually been mature products for a long period of time and we realised that we need to put together a cloud implementation process, which can run these on the cloud or on premise or move the applications between them.
So, we industrialised the way we pasted these things together. We integrated the pieces and many customers are running this today because they are seeing the benefits of the components involved in the cloud application over a long period of time.
We have customers in Australia who have seen years of project delivery reduced to months. In India, we recently introduced some of the features in the 12c releases of Oracle Fusion Middleware. We are seeing a number of customers already utilizing the capabilities of the 11g version of Oracle Fusion Middleware and the extra step they get from the cloud is the ability to relocate the services and to secure and deliver them on cloud.
There are customers who are already successful with this kind of approach and we are building on that success in the new release as well. It gives the enterprises the ability to re-use their skill set. They are accelerating their projects because all the delivery cycle discussions is now so much more industrialised in terms of the project life cycle.
What kind of business traction are you expecting from the platform?
We are actually working with every industry, be it education or healthcare. However, a lot depends on how much the customers want to transform; we are ready with our offering. At present the work with the banking sector may be the slowest because of [certain] reasons, [but] we have still been one of the fastest takers of the technologies. We want to address the customers’ mobile banking requirements and new technology interactions.
