Gold Magazine January - February 2014, Issue 34 | страница 51

For more than three and a half decades,
Oracle has been the leader in database
software. And as it has further developed
technologies and acquired best-in-class
companies over the years, that leadership
has expanded to the entire technology stack,
from servers and storage, to database and
middleware, through applications and into the
cloud. As Oracle Cyprus celebrates its 10th
anniversary, Gold spoke to Michel Clement,
Vice-President Centraleastern Europe of the
Oracle Corporation. By John Vickers
Gold: It is astonishing that the concept
of simplifying IT was at the heart of the
company’s vision almost from the very
beginning. Today, the flow of data is
enormous so how easy is to simplify an
organisation’s IT infrastructure?
Michel Clement: Traditionally, our customers built their IT environments as silos
of information with separate systems dedicated to specific applications such as customer relationship management (CRM),
enterprise resource planning (ERP), or
supply chain management. They were typically satisfied with the functionality of the
individual systems, but not well served by
the system as a whole. They couldn’t fully
share the core infrastructure, computing
power, business processes, data, and other
resources.
Big Data – a term used to describe
unstructured content from sources such
as e-mail, blogs, and social media feeds
– presents additional challenges. With
applications now able to capture big data,
greater strain is placed on the data warehouse and can negatively impact servicelevel agreements between lines of business
and IT. So to achieve greater efficiency,
economy, and service, almost all of our
customers have moved to more standardized and consolidated environments with

global single instances of each application.
Still, our customers struggled with the
limitations of a dedicated, rigid, physical
structure for each application. Computing
power often sat idle for some applications, even as they purchased additional

Oracle

has a history
of providing

products
where they

are needed
servers for other applications experiencing
temporary spikes in demand. They had to
reconfigure many different systems and
deploy the same services and patches over
and over. But the IT world continued to

evolve rapidly, and customers soon began
to take advantage of grid or virtualized environments with shared services, dynamic
provisioning, and standardized configurations or appliances.
Gold: How have things changed even
more in recent times?
M.C.: Today, many customers are continuing the quest to eliminate even more
complexity by moving to an optimized
stack with a complete and integrated set
of technologies that includes applications,
middleware, databases, ser ٕ