Four roads
According to Oracle’s John Abel, senior business director with the company’s engineered systems division, there are essentially four ways to approach the issue of how best to provision infrastructure.
“The first is private cloud, usually an isolated machine or infrastructure, and this is dominated by virtualisation. The next one is public cloud, and the base of most public cloud vendors is pretty similar. We go a little higher — as well as platform as a service and software as a service, we also have a blended stack and our engineered systems in the public cloud,” he said.
“The challenge that customers have to face is that if you are engineering a solution that is today giving you innovation but which tomorrow needs to give you performance and scalability, you will generally pick a technology that is in the public cloud. The cost of entry is a lot lower and you don’t need a lot of infrastructure to get up and running.”
The challenge comes as it grows and scales, and companies need to think a lot more about scalability and performance.
It’s great to put everything into the cloud if you can, and there are certain things that work very well there, but there are obviously considerations so it’s not for everybody. We’re saying to people you should transform to a hybrid infrastructure because that’s really probably what’s going to deliver your requirements, Declan Hogan, HP Enterprise
“It also frequently happens that regulatory issues come up behind the solution, rather than in front of it. Regulation changes occur and you have to make sure that you can stay compliant. You need the option to move back into the private cloud or leave it in the public cloud.”
Public but isolated
There is also demand for Oracle customers to be able to isolate infrastructure in the public cloud.
“We’ve got customers who want us to manage their infrastructure, so we have a private cloud offering, a public cloud offering and then the Oracle managed cloud service where it’s managed for you. It’s essentially an isolated cloud,” he said.
One area Abel said Oracle is seeing an increasing amount of demand for is the concept of the community cloud, where industries come together to pool resources for infrastructure. Companies in the same industry share a common problem, and the business value of the solution is common to all but does not offer a competitive advantage.
“So you get companies that are willing to collaborate within their industry to create a community cloud offering that offers economies of scale without competitive advantage for any one stake holder. It’s not yet common, but it’s an up and coming idea,” Abel said.
“G Cloud is a good example in the UK where you have a public sector cloud, and of course the best known example is at the New York Stock Exchange. A good community cloud offering will be isolated in the public cloud and not many vendors can offer that at the moment.”
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