As customers increasingly adopt Oracle Engineered Systems as a holistic approach to their cloud, analytics, and run-the-business needs, we thought no one would be more in tune with the product and the market than John Fowler, Oracle's executive vice president of systems. Before joining Oracle in 2010, when the company acquired Sun, he held several influential roles over a 20-year career. Fowler was executive vice president of Sun's systems group; chief technology officer of Sun's software organization; and executive vice president of Sun's x64 systems group, focused on delivering industry-standard network computing systems for Solaris, Linux, and Windows.
Michael Hickins: John, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd just said that Oracle sold its 10,000th engineered system. How significant is that milestone?
John Fowler: It’s very significant because it means that you've crossed over from being an early adopter product to a mainstream product in people's infrastructure. I think for most products, you can always find your early adopters. But it's a much bigger thing to build something that a broad population will take advantage of. With 10,000 systems, we are moving from the technically astute early adopter to the broader population.
Hickins: What is the primary appeal of Oracle Engineered Systems, particularly from a business perspective?
Fowler: The primary appeal really starts with economics. In the very beginning of Oracle Engineered Systems, the first adopters were people looking to solve a very, very difficult technical problem. Nowadays, adopters include people solving an economic problem which is, you know, I want to run things more efficiently. And so, we now have both kinds of adopters--those who want to change the way they do their business and other ones who want to save money.
Let me just give you an example. We just put an Oracle SuperCluster into a major energy company in the Midwest and they had a key business process that essentially runs their entire business and would take 21 hours to run on conventional hardware. And on a single Oracle SuperCluster, that process runs in 45 minutes.
So this company is now able to change its whole business process because it can run its key business application right in the middle of the day, or anytime they want to look at their business results. We have lots of examples like that where people are using the extraordinary efficiency and performance to change their businesses.
Hickins: This seems like something that business and IT leaders can use to help them turn up the dial on innovation.
Fowler: I think it's an interesting change in the industry because, for decades now, companies purchased infrastructure from a collection of vendors, and then had to put it together themselves. What we’re providing is a way to buy something that's already integrated and that comes from one vendor. And by the way, I can run your businesses process at least 10 to 15 or 20 times more effectively than you do today.
I have a lot of meetings with customers where they now think of different ways of doing things by virtue of being able to use Oracle Engineered Systems. And that's what we're excited about. That's why I build these things.
Hickins: That kind of begs the question of how is this different from what people used to call “vendor lock-in”?
Fowler: Well, there are two elements of this. One, when we do our Engineered Systems—and they are very carefully named Oracle Engineered Systems and not integrated systems—we're actually rethinking how the software and hardware go together. For example, on an Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the storage itself is participating in and accelerating database transactions. That's one of the secrets to making it so efficient.
But the difference from other vendors is that the application interface is standard. We’re using industry-standard SQL for the database, industry-standard Java for the programming language, and so on. And the database and all these other technologies also run on other platforms. All of your existing applications just work, and you have the choice of moving off if you want, also without changing your applications. So, it's not a lock-in strategy because you can choose to run this application with an Oracle Exadata Database Machine and you can choose to run it with any other system and it will run unchanged. And therefore you are not locked in.
Hickins: How does this help customers simplify their lives?
Fowler: As I like to tell customers, when you buy an Oracle Engineered System, I have what you have. I mean, I have exactly what you have. And that means in my lab, I have the exact combination of hardware and software that you’re going to be running in your data center. I deliver patches that include updates to the whole thing, so customers get a superior service experience. They get to deploy much more quickly. Because the system is in fact manufactured and tested by one company, and the customer does not have to arbitrate disparate systems to figure that out.
So, today, in most data centers, if I have a server problem, I've got to figure out: Should I talk to the database vendor, or is it an operations problem, or is it a virtualization problem? I don't know what the problem is.
Hickins: That’s what people mean when they say ‘one throat to choke,’ right?
Fowler: Well, you could have integrators and consultants and feel like you have one throat to choke. But when you're talking to me, you're talking to the person who built it. You're talking to the author. And I have the emotional as well as the technical capability and interest in solving your problem, because all of this is my problem. I understand it, and if I find a problem in your system, then I add that test into how I build my future systems. In that way, it’s very different from ‘one throat to choke.’ It's one throat to choke, and that throat built this.
It is my product, and I take pride in it and I want to go solve the problems, and then, because I have the engineers who built it, I have a unique capability to understand that involvement.
Hickins: You know, it seems ironic that Oracle Engineered Systems seem to be gaining momentum at a time when everyone is talking about commoditization of the hardware.
Fowler: Yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, we're countercultural because I think the commoditization of hardware is kind of crazy, because if I can give you 10 or 20 times of the efficiency in solving a business problem, there's no possible way that you’re going to get that by playing vendors off against each other on price.
And, you know, I'm pretty sure cars are not a commodity either. Companies compete to make them better. And I think the data center is exactly the same. It's not a consumer product, but by providing depth of engineering of both hardware and software, we have the opportunity to create a completely different IT experience. I just think the world rewards good inventions and will continue to do that. I think the bigger thing is that over a period of time, our industry over and over will reward new thinking and quality products.
