Achieving full power of the cloud harmoniously
Mon 12 Mar 2018
Pascal Giraud, Senior Director EMEA, Technology & Cloud Platform, Oracle
Thanks to the cloud, technology is now completely at the service of business goals
When it comes down to it, technology is quite simply a tool. Its sole function is to help businesses meet their operational goals. However, with traditional monolithic enterprise IT infrastructures, all too often business goals are at the mercy of what is possible within the IT framework. Moreover, when IT cannot deliver against a workload requirement, the cost and time associated with building a new solution is often prohibitive. Today, however, cloud technology means that the tail need never wag the dog again: we are at the start of a new age of flexible IT infrastructure where technology will adapt to the business goal, rather than vice versa.
For businesses looking to take advantage of this unprecedented flexibility, the key is to ensure compute resources (such as network, storage and compute) are able to seamlessly and flexibly integrate with the wider business (i.e. business and customer applications and workloads). It’s a world in which Computer Services (aka IaaS) are mediated through Cloud Platform configuration and integration technology and integrated with Software as a Service and on-premises applications. It’s also a world where all workloads can run on a pre-defined, isolated environment, regardless of the vendor. In this full-stack approach to enterprise IT, businesses can find the resources, orchestration tools and applications to fit any business need. Here the technology is entirely at the service of the overriding business requirement.
Take Suitebox as an example. Suitebox, a New Zealand video software start-up, needed an IT infrastructure that would support its plans for rapid global growth. Suitebox implemented Oracle Cloud Platform and integrated ut with its video and VoIP communication layers, as well as with third-party enterprise CRM and ERP applications. Suitebox also has rolled out Oracle Compute Services for reliable performance and personalized application delivery; enabling it to keep infrastructure costs down, deliver solutions rapidly, and standardize its application architecture. The benefit for Suitebox is that by using Compute Services and a Cloud Platform in harmony with its applications, it benefits from technology that will scale easily and help it meet its growth ambitions.
As the cloud matures it has become clear that businesses can slice and dice cloud services in any one of a number of ways. If, for example, a business simply wants low cost and flexible applications, the cloud can deliver that. Similarly, if it’s after low cost storage or web-scale datacentre capabilities, then the cloud is the place to find them. However, we believe the full power of the cloud can only be released when infrastructure, platform and applications working in harmony.
By integrating infrastructure and platform with applications (whether SaaS or on-premises) businesses are immediately able to scale and tailor applications to fit their business needs precisely. Finally, thanks to virtualization and the cloud, technology is 100 percent in the service of the businesses.
Oracle has a speaking stream at Cloud Expo where we find out more from our customer case studies and emerging technologies.
