One of the boldest, most long-lasting promises ever made in the technology industry has just been fulfilled, once again. Thirty years ago, Larry Ellison promised that Oracle customers would be able to move their data and applications from previous-generation Oracle platforms to the company’s latest and greatest database without having to change code. Ellison just demonstrated how this kind of “upward compatibility” can now be done in the cloud, too.
The promise is this: No matter the tectonic shifts in technology, no matter the ongoing and extensive investments required by Oracle, customers will not be left holding the bag. Specifically, Oracle will make it possible for them to effortlessly move their applications to new, more modern platforms. “That has been our promise for 30 years, and that's a promise we have worked very, very hard to keep,” Ellison said during his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2014 in San Francisco.
And this promise only gains in importance as waves of information complexity come crashing at the dikes of corporate IT systems with unprecedented speed and volume. CIOs can’t worry about whether their corporate data is going to be easily and readily accessible as they upgrade to newer platforms with more modern features and capabilities. It just has to work.
Yet, upward compatibility can’t always be taken for granted. In the tech industry, upward compatibility for hardware, software, and third-party applications is an implicit promise that often goes unfulfilled.
The implication of that failure for customers is millions—in some cases tens of millions—of dollars in extra costs for custom development and manual updates, not to mention additional security exposures, incompatibility, complexity, and slower time to value. In other words, it robs them of the chance to move at speed of customers.
At Oracle, the promise is explicit, and it goes all the way back to the early days of the company, when Ellison and the other co-founders listened to their customers and made the decision to design and build compatibility into each subsequent version of Oracle Database.
That’s harder than it sounds because technology inexorably marches on. Changes have to be made or customers fall behind. But the onus isn’t on Oracle customers to rewrite their applications for the next generation of computing. “We've got to do it. It's part of the promise. It's that 30-year promise. We're keeping that promise,” Ellison said.
Ellison made three other points that are crucial in this context, because they illustrate the stakes at hand.
- With the major upgrade to Oracle's platform, customers can now move any Oracle database from the data center to the cloud by pushing a button, as Ellison himself demonstrated at OpenWorld.
- Customers can also move Oracle applications, including PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications -- with a push of a button -- from on-premise to the cloud without changing code. In the process, those apps are automatically modernized.
- You can move it back. Migration to the cloud is not a one-way street. Says Ellison, "We have the identical database and Java services in both places -- on prem and in the cloud. Move back and forth, do whatever makes sense for your organization, for that particular application, at that time."
What’s most important through decades of technological change—from the twilight era of minicomputers to the early hours of the Internet of Everything—is that Oracle has allowed its customers to cross each technological chasm, to transition from one era to another, without losing the value of their original investments.
As Ellison put it, Oracle’s database was originally “built for Digital minicomputers, IBM mainframes—actually lots of different kinds of minicomputers. There were no such things as PCs at the time.
“And along came PCs and along came this new computer architecture called client server. And our clients said, ‘Oh, wait a second, wait a second. I'd like to move my minicomputer database over to client server….'
“And we said, well, yeah, that's our promise. We'll do that. And along comes the cloud, and that's exactly what people expect us to do, what we've been doing for the last 30-plus years, which is to move their databases and move their applications to the next generation of technology without you having to change a single line of code.”
CIOs and other business and tech executives who have invested in IT infrastructure over the years will certainly appreciate the value of that kind of carry-it-forward promise.
Ellison again: “We couldn't simply be a specialist in SaaS applications, like a Salesforce.com. We couldn't simply be a specialist in infrastructure services, like an Amazon.com. But we're actually compelled, had no choice, we had to deliver SaaS and PaaS and infrastructure as a service together because of a promise we made to our customers more than 30 years ago.”
It’s the kind of promise that’s all too rare—for consumers and businesses alike.
