Posts by Shameless Oracle Flack

Worst-case Brexit could kill 92,000 science, tech jobs across UK – report

From the study:

"As with all modelling approaches, E3ME is a simplification of reality and is based on a series of assumptions. Compared to other macroeconomic modelling approaches, the assumptions are relatively non-restrictive as most relationships are determined by the historical data in the model database. This does, however, present its own limitations, for which the model user must be aware:

• The quality of the data used in the modelling is very important. Substantial resources are put into maintaining the E3ME database and filling out gaps in the data. However, particularly in developing countries, there is some uncertainty in results due to the data used.

• Econometric approaches are also sometimes criticised for using the past to explain future trends. "

So this model is based on macroeconomics and past history. The whole point of Brexit is to deregulate the British economy by decoupling it from the nonsensical, Euro-centric and near-socialist view of regulation on the Continent. As has happened in the USA, this deregulation will lead to higher capital investment and consumer spending, and hence economic growth. This study is about as worst case as it can get, which is not surprising given it was sponsored by the Brexit haters in the London city government.

Who's that cuddling up in the container... *squints* Wow you're getting along well

Re: Reassurance

"As long as you are using someone else's computer, YOU ARE NOT SECURE.

It may be cheaper... but you have no control."

... said the infrastructure bigots at Equifax, Deloitte, and the US govt's OPM right before corporate security came by to escort them out of the building.

Public cloud is more secure than what local enterprise teams can implement due to the scale of operations, which requires huge amounts of tight processes, automation, and testing. The only enterprises that can come close are the largest banks.

'Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we've ever seen in the history of humanity'

Re: AWS Lambda “lock-in”

You can keep making excuses for AWS, but it's not complicated: the API's are Amazon-specific and you cannot run this code elsewhere. Larry said it best: AWS is more closed than the IBM mainframe. At least mainframe hardware was produced by companies other than IBM.

How is the big switch to the public cloud working out?

Re: Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

While you're rolling on the floor Oracle investors are loading up on the stock and laughing all the way to the bank.

Re: Frankly delusional.

Oracle's SaaS growth rate (70%) is almost twice the growth rate of AWS (~40%), which is 90% IaaS revenue. Large customers like AT&T have just begun to move their large Oracle workloads into our PaaS and IaaS public cloud. As Chuck states, it's all about platforms/franchises, which is why a lot of us at Oracle consider Microsoft our true (and worthy) competitor for moving on-premise workloads to the public cloud.

Re: Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

Once again, Oracle's public cloud includes SaaS/PaaS/IaaS as an integrated stack with a $6 billion per year run rate, growing at 70% per year. As Larry Ellison has stated, the profound price/performance and feature advantages of our IaaS cloud will ultimately make it the IaaS cloud of choice for enterprise applications.

Re: Frankly delusional.

You're missing it because as an infrastructure person, SaaS is invisible to you while at the same time it is slowly, silently eating your workloads. Oracle's combined SaaS/PaaS/IaaS cloud is $6 billion now and will likely hit $10 billion within 5-6 quarters, with SaaS growing at 70+% versus 40% IaaS growth at Amazon.

As Chris points out, the whole cloud and on-premise battle will be playing out over the long run.

You can't find tech staff – wah, wah, wah. Start with your ridiculous job spec

Good piece, correction on Oracle and outsourcing

This piece makes lots of good points about hiring and location. With respect to Oracle and outsourcing, outsourcing is IBM's gig. In traditional outsourcing, you don't change your infrastructure, you just hire cheaper people to run the same system (i.e., your mess for less). Oracle's cloud approach is to leverage automation to reduce the headcount for complex, repetitive, manual tasks that don't add value, just like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in their own clouds. This frees up headcount for application development, at the PaaS or SaaS layers. if you can just buy SaaS application software and not program, why not do it? That's just software engineering best practice. Further, Oracle is aggressively promoting its low code development environments that allow lines of business to develop their own software. So no, Oracle is not against companies or governments doing their own software development, were against doing software development that is expensive, complex, costly, and risky while adding very little value to the business.

Hitachi's IoT gang punts never-off data protection platform

I know the HDID engineering team

... and they are well led and smart. Good luck with this new product.

Symantec's guzzled the Azure Kool-Aid, tells all its customers: Drink up!

Another one bites the dust...

Time for the on-premise brigade of infrastructure do-it-yourselfer's to admit defeat, you don't add business value or innovate anymore. It's time to embrace public cloud, it will solve 80% of your workload problems and get you an ally to help on the security front, I tell you how in this blog post:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-companies-defenseless-against-cyberattacks-what-o-keefe-ph-d-/

Release the KRACKen patches: The good, the bad, and the ugly on this WPA2 Wi-Fi drama

Drop IEEE for Apache/Internet Societ

IEEE is supposed to be non-profit but it is always trying to make money off standardization efforts. Better to leverage Apache's infrastructure and use the money saved by dropping IEEE to fund open source driver development for all major phone and PC platforms.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd reads 'mean tweets' about his 2025 vision

Re: bothered?

Nope. Oracle is #1 SaaS provider for large companies, and our SaaS is growing faster annually (70+%) than AWS's IaaS (40%). Combined IaaS/PaaS/SaaS revenues should pass $10 billion in roughly 5-6 quarters. The huge SaaS consumption by enterprises bodes ill for the DIY infrastructure crowd. Hurd is right, deal with it

Consistency is key to Oracle and Microsoft's hybrid cloud clout

great article, this is the future of hybrid cloud...

... and integrated public and private clouds will likely replace open stack efforts as they allow customers to focus on higher levels of the cloud stack, including paas and saas:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automation-versus-customization-oracle-cloud-machine-o-keefe-ph-d-/

Re: Oracle Cloud in the same league with Azure?

You're seriously wrong. Oracle's cloud includes SaaS/PaaS/IaaS, including SaaS applications for Cloud@Customer, and is on track to be $10 billion in sales within 6 quarters. Oracle's cloud is growing MUCH faster than Amazon's (72% versus 40%) and Oracle IaaS is the newest and most innovate IaaS on the market, and the only enterprise-capable IaaS for the foreseeable future.

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

Do More by Doing Less

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-companies-defenseless-against-cyberattacks-what-o-keefe-ph-d-/

"Winning is about a deep understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses as well as the enemies. What is wholly missing in enterprise IT security is the latter: a strategic sense of vulnerability has given way to an unearned confidence in security products and best practices, comfortably layered into the localized IT bureaucracy that rejects change, embraces process over results, and like the French admiring their Maginot line, imagines they are safe."

Splunk hits Oracle's Larry where it hurts: His failure to win America's Cup boat race

Splunk's CEO doth protest too much

"A canned statement emitted from Oracle's long-suffering flacks..."

We're not really suffering, we flacks think Larry keeps things interesting, and there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Seriously, who can argue that there is absolutely no way that Splunk can detect all relevant signals and remediate entire systems using that information? Larry's point is that Oracle deeply understands the application, hardware, and OS because we built it all. It's exactly how we make the system run autonomously.

Splunk is part of the current security problem. It and many other vendors who sell point security solutions that customers are then supposed to integrate seamlessly have over promised and under delivered for years: custom, snowflake IT layer cakes of independent network, storage, and servers layered with a patchwork quilt of non-integrated security monitoring software are essentially defenseless against determined hackers, as Equifax and Deloitte have shown.

Your only hope: find big allies (like Oracle, AWS, Google or Microsoft) to whom you can offload your infrastructure, APIs and apps and re-focus on defending a smaller surface area and territory. Focus your efforts on intensive testing and hardening of all your systems, leveraging red teams and really aggressive attack training.

I tell you how to do it in this pretty awesome blog post:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-companies-defenseless-against-cyberattacks-what-o-keefe-ph-d-/

Google hooks up with Scale for cloud collab?! What does it all mean?

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

Too little, too late Google. Oracle's Cloud@Customer is public cloud at your data center, same APIs, same management, same price, all supported by Oracle. Azure Stack is a pale imitation, without truly integrated hardware, and with a complex support model.

SMBs will mostly end up in the public cloud. Partners should focus on lift-and-shift of applications and hiding public cloud complexity from SMB users, rather than helping SMBs run their own infrastructure, which is going the way of small companies doing their own payroll; nowadays, almost everyone uses ADP, i.e., SaaS.

Vendors rush to call everything AI even if it isn't, or doesn't help

Great piece, it's more about platforms that deliver broad capabilities than about specific new shiny AI things.

UK.gov embraces Oracle's cloud: Pragmatism or defeatism?

For a lot of standard Oracle applications (Fusion, EBS, etc.) the Oracle public cloud will have templates and best practices that allow local staff to make the migration quite easily, with expensive apps consultants.

Re: Cloud costs

So make sure you have a cloud architecture that works the same on-prem as well as in the public cloud. That way you can manage costs under the umbrella of the same cloud architecture, without managing complex integrations between the two. Oracle can do this for you today.

What is the enterprise cloud?

Cloud automation at the right level is key

"If IT infrastructure can be boiled down to an enterprise cloud, a desired state tool and git to version the configs, we've reached the point where burning it all down and restarting makes sense."

Yes we have, but leverage cloud vendors like Oracle to handle the base level automation (for databases, storage, networking, and apps) and exploit Terraform, Chef, Puppet and other open source tools (fully-supported by Oracle) to manage your complete enterprise infrastructure, both on-prem and in the cloud.

NHS WannaCrypt postmortem: Outbreak blamed on lack of accountability

Local IT professionals can never keep up, cloud automation is the key.

This post-mortem report on NHS vulnerability to Wannacry get's it half right.

The half-wrong part is the suggestion that more cybersecurity professionals will solve the problem. This is incorrect. Individual government or corporate departments cannot in general cope with attacks from the private armies of cyber criminals, much less state-sponsored attacks from e.g. Russian or Chinese governments.

Localized civil defense is not going to work. Instead, these groups must partner with an ally with the scale and automation firepower to contend with skilled cybercriminals: the ally their looking for are the cloud vendors like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and of course, Oracle.

The other half of the report was correct, more investment is needed, and that investment should be focused on converting local IT to cloud-managed IT run by global teams of world-class professionals with the right tools and architectures to enable proper security.

So despite all the cash ploughed into big data, no one knows how to make it profitable

@Andy 73 said:

"It remains a very cluttered toolbox, requiring experienced devs who can integrate with the company as much as with the software. Building a solution is still a nuts and bolts job, which leaves employers at the mercy of over optimistic devs and divas."

Therein lies the problem, as Matt Asay the OP also pointed out. Companies really need an internal culture and org shift to make big data happen, combined with reasonable expectation setting. In a large company, big data requires almost a music business mindset: there will be lots of OK songs, some bombs, and a few big hits. Tolerance for failure and experimentation is required, as is organization agility (sadly lacking as pointed out by other commenters) that allows small teams to make small (and large) progress with lots of experimentation and risk-taking.

One large company that has succeeded is EOG, the largest oil producer in North America. It starts with an agile culture and mindset, including an engineer CEO who experiments with data himself and constantly pushes his staff to develop new, data-driven apps that can incrementally improve operations and efficiency. The classic expensive slow waterfall with an expected outcome, or aimlessly swimming around in a dataset to find "something" is a recipe for failure, and its likely these org challenges that are the key hindrance to success at this point.

Dell EMC's Azure Stack: Get thee behind me, Microsoft subscriptions

I agree that on-premise IT will always be with us. It's a cost-effective way to go when your utilization is very high and consistent. I think Trevor is massively underestimating the cost, complexity and risk of building and maintaining some kind of cloud-neutral software layer that works for most of your workloads. This approach can certainly work for open-source based, generic workloads, but for example big Oracle database workloads or complex, interconnected Microsoft applications, I don't think so.

And you have to look at it from senior management's perspective: they see the IT department as a competitor to Oracle/Google/Microsoft/AWS cloud services. Also the complicated, high-maintenance infrastructure to attempt to build to somehow/maybe commoditize clouds sometime in the distant future, is money they could spend on business-impacting applications built on PaaS or SaaS services in the public cloud.

Going forward, local infrastructure IT is going to have to compete with the public cloud providers on how they add to enterprise/SMB application agility. Infrastructure is really just table stakes at this point.

HPE: You're rubbish at hybrid cloud – so we'll cook a NüStack to fix it

Oracle's cloud can rock your world, or at least your Oracle database's world...

HPE is struggling to come up with reasonable local private cloud beyond simple VM farms, much less a full IaaS/PaaS/SaaS public cloud stack with precise on-prem equivalents, which Oracle, very conveniently for the customer, already has.

Michael Dell? More like Michael in-Dell-nial: No public cloud, no future

Growth and Business Value Add

@ Steve Chalmers said:

"is just the endgame for x86 processors, in server storage, and cheap networking, delivered not just with an extraordinarily sharp pencil on equipment cost, but also with extraordinary automation and economies of scale on the management side, beyond what Enterprise was ever able to achieve. But doing this has required investing an enormous level of capital in a narrow way of doing business, which will have to stay in place for a long time to earn the shareholders a proper return on that investment."

Steve is effectively backing into Chris's arguments from the article. So although it is true, as some comments on this thread have suggested, that public cloud is not always the right model (e.g., consider HPC environments with large numbers of servers running 99.999% utilized for 5 years), public cloud scale and automation go far beyond what can be achieved by any enterprise IT department on its own. The field is littered with the carcasses of internal-IT-owned OpenStack "cloud" projects that were never truly completed and cost a fortune in time, lost opportunity, and manpower. Only very large, profitable companies with either an in-place cloud for their own business (i.e., Amazon, Google) or a platform franchise (i.e., Microsoft in OS/middleware, Oracle in database/applications) that can be used to subsidize long-term cloud development *at scale* will be able to build real, competitive public clouds.

And a question for all the infrastructure folks who responded with some "math" on how they can roll--their-own so much cheaper than some public cloud vendor. If that's true, then why is the public cloud growing at 30-50% while the on-prem IT market is slowly shrinking? And that's just IaaS. If you add SaaS, vendors like Oracle are seeing >80% growth rates year-over-year. Perhaps your CIO and VP of IT has finally figured out that roll-your-own infrastructure IT is a recipe for overstaffing, complexity, downtime, and poor ROI.

Data trashed? When RPO 0 isn't enough

Re: Leverage Appliances to Achieve Zero Data Loss for Oracle Databases

You're right, totally hear you on that.

Leverage Appliances to Achieve Zero Data Loss for Oracle Databases

Good review of cost-tradeoffs for achieving RPO of 0 (i.e., zero data loss) or near zero across your full software stack via your standard block storage platforms and related tools. The problem is that without deep integration with the database, where most corporate data lives, you can't achieve this. No block storage device can give you this 100% (although it can come close with crash-consistent recovery).

START SHAMELESS COMMERCIAL PLUG

In contrast, Oracle's Recovery Appliance can efficiently provide zero data loss for your Oracle databases, where the most important corporate data resides, with flexible topologies to meet varying redundancy requirements and seamless integration with Oracle and third-party tape. This solves your hardest and most important "zero data loss" problem without a lot of complex development, integration, and testing work on your part, while integrating directly into Oracle's OEM management tool platform already being used by your DBA's today.

END SHAMELESS COMMERCIAL PLUG

But as the first comment pointed out, devices such as Recovery Appliance and others mentioned my Trevor must be considered in the light of the complete application software stack to achieve the right service levels for data resilience and data availability back to users and other services.