Vision from the Top 2012: Judson Althoff, Oracle

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

This decade has been, and will continue to be influential in the way companies and partners alike conduct business for years to come. From vertically engineered systems to achieving extreme performance, there is no denying partners are looking to reach great milestones in these areas.  Vertically engineered systems are changing the game for data centers today, spanning to such areas as performance and footprint.

As we look towards the future, it will be necessary to offer engineered systems as a more efficient way to capture ideal market segments. When building a car, why would you buy each individual piece from a separate vendor when you can purchase all the car parts from one? The same idea has been true when looking at advancements to vertically engineered systems.

It is no surprise that ISVs are looking for improved scalability and security. Knowing this, Oracle has tied together a complete package of server, storage and networking software to ultimately deliver extreme performance to our partners. Oracle has also developed the Oracle Exastack Program for ISVs which enables ISVs to leverage a scalable, integrated infrastructure to deliver applications tuned, tested and optimized for high-performance.  Through this program, ISVs are now able to demonstrate support for Oracle software on Oracle hardware, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud; these platforms have already helped to shape the industry as we know it.

What's the future for hybrid cloud strategies?

Movement into the cloud has proven to be a move in the right direction for countless companies. For organizations looking to take advantage of the benefits associated with both private and public clouds, the hybrid cloud is the route to go. The hybrid cloud is typically seen as a logical adoption model for customers and partners as they evolve from on-premise or private cloud deployments, into public cloud deployments. One approach to the hybrid cloud would be to allow companies to effectively leverage new cloud-based offerings and capabilities, but only when it makes sense for that business to do so. It is this type of flexibility that facilitates choice and offers investment protection in other deployment models.

It is imperative that the future for hybrid clouds is one which is complete, open and integrated, giving partners a choice when it comes to deployment. The industry today has seen an enterprise evolution to cloud computing; because of this, companies should begin to develop products that are able to fit into this ideal blended model, as customers and partners start to more comfortably adopt the cloud.

Oracle has found variation in customer cloud requirements, including use cases, implementation needs, and deployment models that incorporate advanced cloud concepts such as self-service and hybrid clouds.  This is yet another reason why it is important to let customers evolve and transform to cloud at whatever pace makes sense for their business.

Today, ISVs can use the same Oracle infrastructure and platform technologies (including Java, Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic), to build, deploy and manage their own applications, either in private, public, or hybrid clouds. These technologies are also available in the form of Oracle engineered systems which ISVs can leverage as a common architecture across multiple deployment models.

As is evident with the many different public cloud offerings available today, public clouds are evolving, but the ultimate evolution will be the movement into a hybrid cloud model. It will be important to have the standards of interoperability, portability and technology in place for this shift, as companies continue to pioneer in this cloud based environment.

This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2012.