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Oracle Software Chief Thomas Kurian: 10 Strategic Cloud Computing Insights

Oracle

(Revolweb)

As cloud computing surges into the mainstream of business-technology strategies and deployments, plenty of questions are still swirling around regarding security, time to value, public versus private, lock-in, cost, and more.

For businesses, these questions are reasonable as cloud adoptions grow rapidly around the world and increasingly essential workloads move from their traditional on-premise home to the cloud.

For the tech industry, the novelty of specialized and niche cloud products is beginning to lose favor as businesses look to avoid the costly habits of the past: purchasing lots and lots of point solutions from lots and lots of incompatible vendors requiring lots and lots of integrators and money and time to stitch it all together.

Customers are growing tired of the tech industry’s intramural squabbles and the increasingly arcane technical trivia that are being trotted out in the absence of clear and understandable and enduring discussions of the business value of these cloud solutions (see our recent piece called The New and Dangerous Threat to Cloud Computing).

In the midst of this contentious marketplace, Oracle executive vice-president of Product Development Thomas Kurian recently spoke to a gathering of Oracle customers from various industries across the globe and offered a broad series of perspectives about the cloud’s business value, technology flexibility, and Oracle’s cloud strategy overall.

Since Kurian leads product development at Oracle for all software including Oracle Cloud, and because he meets each year with dozens of customers to help them shape their business-technology strategy, he’s uniquely qualified to address some of the controversial issues cited above. In that context, here are 10 of Kurian’s top insights from that recent discussion involving issues of greatest importance to customers.

1) For LOB, Cloud Computing = Speed. “My sense is when we look at what cloud computing really means to people, it means different things to different audiences. If you talk to people who are in an HR line of business or sales line of business or even financial or ERP line of business, they think of the cloud as, ‘I can get an application delivered to me over the browser, I get the latest updates more quickly, and I can eliminate some of the complexity that I have operationally because I've heavily customized. And, at the same time, I get the ability to get new features at a quicker rate, because the environment upgrades quickly, which is very attractive.’ And most decisions in the lines of business that we've seen -- the business lines -- most of the executives are thinking around functional reasons as opposed to operational reasons.”

2) Private Clouds Can Out-Scale Virtualization. “When it comes to decisions around where do things get deployed, if you're buying a set of hardware, do you buy a dedicated infrastructure for a specific set of applications or do you buy virtualized storage and virtualized compute, so that you can run it more in an elastic fashion, even if it sits within your firewall? On a private cloud, I think that's where IT is typically involved. I think people are starting to realize that traditional virtualization, which is just server consolidation—they’ve reached a certain scale with it, and now to get to the next level of things, they need to really move to a much more elastic infrastructure, rather than just consolidate boxes and get cost down. And I think that's starting to get to be more and more real, where the workloads we see people deploying is they start with dev-and-test, which are less risky, obviously, and then they move to more departmental systems, and at some point, we think mission critical systems will move there, too.”

Okay, so far so good--but what about speed?

3) Cloud Deployments Can Be Incredibly Fast.  “An Oracle customer in the health and nutrition field “procured an Oracle HR could system on December 18, 2011. They went live on January 10, 2012, with 10,000 employees in 60 countries, and that's with Christmas in between. So the kind of speed that you get in these cloud deployments, if you look at traditional HR deployments or ERP deployments, you wouldn't have even bought the servers by that time.”

4) Oracle Offers Broadest Set of Cloud Apps; Vertical Apps To Come. “Today, we've got more applications in the cloud than any other software company: horizontal apps such as financials, purchasing, project management, human capital, talent management, supply chain, sales, marketing, customer service, and support. And there are a lot of companies using those products [10,000 customers with 25 million users]. And you literally can buy these and use them without having to install and configure the software. As we make further progress, we're going to verticalize this into special vertical applications, as well.”

5) A Totally New Model for Customization: Fast, Stable, Less Costly. “Traditionally, there's been a big debate in enterprise software on do you customize or do you go plain vanilla? And our view is actually that's not the right debate at all. It's not a question of do you customize—it’s how do you customize. And in the past, the way that people have customized software is they'd write a lot of code. And the code is then built directly—they modify the database schema of the thing, they write a lot of custom code, and then they go to do an upgrade, and they say, ‘Oh my God, this is going to take me six years and $60 million!’

“Now, when you go to a cloud environment, one of the things you have is you can only access the system through a browser. So how do you modify the data model? How do you modify the UI? How do you modify workflow? How do you modify analytics? And the way we do it is through a set of browser-based tools that modify the application, but browsers don't spit out code, so the way you modify the application is you're generating data that models the changes you want in the system. And the great thing about it is everybody knows that data is really easy to upgrade. It's been done for 25 years. So upgrading a system when you have modeled your customizations through data is much, much easier and much quicker.

“So I think the central thing about agility and speed with regard to software delivered as a service is how quickly can you do your first go-live, and then how quickly do you get new features as you go forward? And most people are really surprised at how fast they can go live with a deployment and then how quickly they can add and get new features up on it.”

5) Extending the Value of Speed to Platform and Infrastructure. “Now, on a platform and infrastructure basis, I think agility's slightly different. I think on infrastructure, people have found that if you look across their environment—we’ve got customers who have, say, 6,000 Oracle database instances—and you look at all of them, and they're all almost the same from a configuration point of view, but different. And so when you say I want to provision a two-node Oracle database, well, this one is configured slightly differently from that one, and that one's configured slightly different from this one.

“And so the challenge you have is when you go through things like upgrades or patches or tuning, there's an enormous amount of cost that's associated with the variability of the configuration. Now, we, for example, offer the Oracle Database on the public cloud, and customers really like it because departmental users say, hey, I want to get a database, and I'm not getting it from my IT department, so I want to go and get that via the cloud. And you don’t run into complex support issues: one of the interesting things about our Platform as a Service is that we support 4,800 customers with six people!

“And it's because it's really the whole thing: the way you provision it, the way you configure it, the way you manage it, the way you allocate storage, the way you tune it. And so it allows us to provide customers with the ability to go to a browser and request a 10-gigabyte, single-node database, or a two 20-gigabyte database, two-node. And so on the platform and the infrastructure side, we are able to offer to customers the ability to provide the software in a much more standardized configuration, as well as resources to scale up and down on demand.”

6) The False Dichotomy of Public Cloud versus Private Cloud. “I think in general, cloud is in its very, very early stages, and it means a lot of things to a lot of people. In reality, the approach we're taking to the problem is pretty simple. We feel that, first of all, there's a, I would say, dichotomy, which is artificial, between private cloud and public cloud. And most of the issue is largely which datacenter does something run in, and who is responsible operating it?

“Most companies today have outsourced their datacenters, and so it's almost funny. You say there's a machine in this datacenter that's running your stuff, and it sits behind your firewall, and right next to it, there may be a machine running Oracle stuff in the same datacenter, but this is called public, and that's called private. To us, that's kind of an artificial line that doesn't make much sense. It's largely a question of where do you deploy it. From a software architecture point of view, we think it's the same architecture that should be ushered to run a private cloud and a public cloud. The way you deploy your infrastructure, meaning the way you virtualize your compute and storage, the way you deploy your applications behind the firewall on a private cloud should look exactly the same as how you would deploy a public cloud. So I think that's one of the dichotomies that we see.”

7) The Business Value Offered by Complete Cloud Solutions. “There's a European financial institution that’s a big PeopleSoft customer. They moved their applications over to Fusion as their HCM solution. Surrounding that PeopleSoft application, they had a lot of different departmental applications that people built with People tools, because the HR team had a little reporting data mart that they needed, they had a little application, which is for children to order toys at Christmas, and the company delivers gifts at Christmastime. Those are all built using People tools. And when the application went into the cloud as SaaS, they had to rebuild those applications, and the IT organization said since you put the application on a cloud, why don't you redo your departmental solutions also in a cloud?

“And so they're looking at using a PaaS, or platform as a service, solution: our database, and some of our analytic tools in the cloud to do that. So the first thing that we saw was we're one of the few cloud vendors that said it makes sense to do SaaS and PaaS, instead of saying we only do SaaS, and if you want a PaaS, go somewhere else and get it. And so we added that. And then once you get into platform as a service, people typically want elastic compute and storage. So they want to scale up or down capacity, so we're bringing in an infrastructure as a service offering. And so our view is that the need for completeness is a reflection of what customers eventually want.”

8) The Business Value of a Single Cloud Architecture. “Another difference between Oracle and our competitors is we don't have a hard line that you should have one architecture in the public cloud, and a totally different architecture in the private cloud. It doesn't make any sense to us at all. The way we virtualize compute and storage is based on a standard called OpenStack. It's the same architecture that you'll see us deliver in the software that runs our engineered systems -- Exadata, Exalogic -- and it's also the same thing that we use to virtualize our compute and storage in the public cloud. We think that's the right architecture and it's the right stack…. Then it’s just a question of who runs your cloud: do you run it behind your firewall and manage it, or do you want us to put it in our public cloud and manage it?  So we believe this issue of private cloud versus public cloud is a false dichotomy driven by certain vendors coming in. When a public cloud vendor comes in, they say the only way you should run the software is in a public cloud, because that's the only thing they’ve got to sell you. We just don’t agree with that approach.”

Next up--the #1 priority for Oracle's software team:

9) The Journey to the Cloud Is Long-Term for Customers—and for Oracle. “It's kind of interesting whenever I have that discussion, because, today, if you look at the big players out there in the cloud space -- Amazon EC2, for example. They've done a nice job, a great company. But if you'd add up all the math, it's somewhere between $750 million and $1 billion in total spend that's going on over there. Now, if you look at that relative to all the hardware that's out in companies today and what's being produced, it's a fraction.

“In our view, people are just starting on this journey, and the very important thing is we have a major, major, major engineering effort underway at Oracle on applications as well as all of our technology: our database, our middleware, analytic tools, document management, etc. We're going to give you those capabilities on our public cloud as well as within your firewall. And it is the central thing that we're doing in the software team.”

10) Cloud Projects Must Fulfill Objectives of both Business and IT. “One of the very important things for us is we don't want IT and the lines of business to feel at odds over adopting a solution. The general thing we see is lines of business want speed, while IT is worried about all the operational practices: is this thing secure, does it comply with corporate standards? For example, let's take platform as a service. One of the reasons we went into it and offered it on the public cloud, as well as on your private cloud, is we see customers wanting to start with developing stuff in the public cloud. And our belief is that if it's based on the same Oracle software that you run already, then corporate IT doesn't need to feel scared about scenarios like whether or not IBM will take back this application someday, or does it support the same version that I'm currently running as my standard.

“And so a lot of our focus has been on—and again, I feel very strongly about this—creating and offering one single software architecture for how you build and deploy software in a cloud. And that's 100% orthogonal to the issue of where is the datacenter on which the system runs—we don’t want customers to have to be concerned about that, and spend time and effort trying to work that out.

“Some customers are happy about having cloud technology in our datacenter, and others, for a variety of reasons—regulatory, risk, etc.—will have certain systems they want behind their own firewall, even for just operational practice. And so for some cloud vendors to say, ‘Well, if you want the benefits of cloud computing, the only place you get it happens to be in a public cloud’—to us, that's just the wrong design. And it's also quite unnecessary technically.”

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