Gold Magazine January - February 2014, Issue 34 | Page 52

technology

M.C.: Larry Ellison said in his keynote
2013 conference speech that the present
era was not a PC era, nor an Internet era,
but an Information Era. Let’s take for example Big Data. In this area, we have the
most comprehensive package of hardware,
software, and service products on the
market. It is very important, because on
the one hand huge quantities of archive
data have been accumulated by the business sector, e.g. the telecommunications
or power industry, and on the other hand,
consumers themselves are generating data
through the social media. Thanks
to the latter, new ideas are born
and new businesses are established,
engaged in new areas of operations.
Gold: The acquisition of Sun
Microsystems in 2010 was seen
as a major step, not only for Oracle but for the whole of the IT
industry. Have the results lived
up to your expectations?
M.C.: Oracle acquired Sun in
2010, and since that time Oracle’s
hardware and software engineers
have worked side-by-side to build
fully integrated systems and optimized solutions designed to
achieve performance levels that
are unmatched in the industry.
Early examples include the Oracle
Exadata Database Machine X28, and the first Oracle Exalogic
Elastic Cloud, both introduced in late
2010. During 2011, Oracle introduced
the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, a generalpurpose, engineered system with Oracle
Solaris that delivered record-breaking performance on a series of enterprise benchmarks. In 2013 we released the SPARC
T5 server. Oracle’s SPARC-based systems
are some of the most scalable, reliable,
and secure products available today. Sun’s
prized software portfolio has continued
to develop as well, with new releases
of Oracle Solaris, MySQL, and the recent
introduction of Java 7. Oracle invests in
innovation by designing hardware and

software systems that are engineered to
work together.
Gold: Given the company’s present
leading position, how difficult is it to
plan for even further innovation and
progress in the future?
M.C.: Oracle has always been ahead of
the curve in developing new products. We
spent 6 years completely redeveloping our
software in order to make it cloud-ready.
We can claim to be the only company
that runs exactly the same software in

We can claim
to be the only
company that

runs exactly

the same
software in

the cloud and

on-premise
the cloud and on-premise. We knew, six
years ago, that one could not take a piecemeal approach to developing apps for the
cloud, and we have been proved correct.
We recently announced at Oracle Openworld an in-memory option for our 12c
database. This means that, at the flick of a
switch, you can have an in-memory database if you want one. This, again, is unlike our competitors who have developed
stand-alone systems that have this functionality. Similarly, we are now developing machine to machine capabilities in
our new products. We are also looking at
specialised systems such as ingestible sen-

52 Gold the international investment, finance & professional services magazine of cyprus

sors. These sensors can be swallowed by
patients, and their drug consumption and
their body’s reactions to it monitored by
the sensor. It represents a breakthrough in
this area of medicine. We are constantly
receiving feedback and input from our
customers, and we use that experience
from our hundreds of thousands of customers to enhance our existing products
and deliver new ones.
Gold: What was the incentive for a
huge company like Oracle to open a
branch in a small country like
Cyprus ten years ago?
M.C.: Oracle has a history of providing products where they are
needed. Oracle was present in Cyprus a long time before the opening
of the local subsidiary, through a
representative company and partners. Once we established a presence and it was clear that a further
investment was needed because
our customers and partners in the
region had and still have the need
for our products and services, we
opened and successfully grew our
local office, our partner network
and our customer base. In other
countries where there have been difficulties we have maintained a similar standing: our customers place
their confidence in our support, and
we work extremely hard to live up to
that expectation. We stay with our
customers through the good and the bad.
Gold: Has Oracle Cyprus lived up to
your high expectations?
M.C.: The local office has grown in people
and numbers in the past 10 years and maintains successful and long-lasting relationships with i