Corporations struggling with Big Data — Oracle

MANILA, Philippines — A number of companies are still at a loss on how to make use of Big Data said database tech giant Oracle Corporation.

According to a recent survey data by Oracle, “six out of ten companies struggle with existing data because of how hard they are to gather and organize, eventually leading to islands of stale data, stale data, and drowning of spreadsheets.”

Shridar Jayakumar, program director for Oracle Asia Pacific business analytics, said that organizations are indeed struggling to take full advantage of the huge amount of data they are generating.

“These challenges indicate the need for companies to ensure data quality and establish a solid data flow that indentifies and connects data points across the organization,” said Jayakumar. “Building on its strength, Oracle can provide solutions that could help businesses overcome these challenges.”

With the inherent challenges corporations face in utilizing Big Data, Jayakumar said that demand for business analytics is now on the rise, more so in the face of growing disruptive trends such as cloud computing, mobile, social, the Internet of Things, and Big Data.

If leveraged correctly using appropriate solutions, Jayakumar said that such trends could work to the advantage of many corporations.

California-based Oracle is one of the leading vendors in the global industry of business analytics, estimated to have generated $37.7 billion in industry sales last year according to IDC. Growing by nearly a tenth every year, the industry is forecast by IDC to hit $59.2 billion in 2018.

source: interaksyon.com

Oracle adds 10 new cloud services

MANILA, Philippines — U.S. multinational computer company Oracle Corp has added 10 new cloud computing services in line with the company’s bid to deliver the most comprehensive cloud portfolio in the industry.

The new services, which will be available on a subscription basis, expand the company’s portfolio of application, social, platform, and infrastructure services.

“Unlike other clouds that offer services in one or two layers, Oracle Cloud is the only cloud that delivers a broad portfolio of integrated services across applications, social, platform, and infrastructure,” the company said in a press release.

Oracle said that the new services will help “customers and partners further capitalize on the power of cloud computing.”

The 10 new services are the compute cloud, object storage cloud, database cloud, java cloud, business intelligence cloud, documents cloud, mobile cloud, database backup cloud, billing and revenue management cloud, and cloud marketplace.

“Oracle Cloud provides the industry’s most complete suite of modern, enterprise SaaS applications including Human Capital Management, Customer Experience, and Enterprise Resource Management, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities,” the company said.

Flexibility is also accorded to customers as they can choose to deploy Oracle software in traditional on-premise data centers, private clouds, or in other public clouds.

According to the company, they currently support nine million customers and 19 billion transactions daily on 7,000 servers and 200 petabytes of storage in 13 data centers in the world.

source: interaksyon.com

Oracle updates database system, promises more ‘cloud’ features

MANILA, Philippines — In keeping with the times, enterprise software giant Oracle officially launched recently a major update to its database software system, promising consolidation and integration features that make it easy to use databases with new cloud applications.

With the new Oracle Database 12c system, businesses can now deploy container-based databases that according to Oracle Senior Director for Enterprise Technology Kaleem Chaudhry, will give IT administrators the power to manage multitudes of databases as one component.

Sporting a new, reworked architecture, the latest Oracle Database update allows for multitenant hosting of databases, which means a number of databases can be hosted on the same hardware without drawing up more computer resources.

Chaudhry said the company has added more than 500 new features in the new release, which came five years after the launch of Oracle Database 11g, the last of the grid-computing-optimized databases from Oracle.

“When you are able to consolidate [databases], six times less hardware is required, but you can store up to 250 instances of databases,” he explained.

This makes Oracle’s new database system, he said, perfect for the new age of cloud computing, since it allows for maximum elasticity in that businesses can quickly scale up their database requirements whenever they see fit.

With a container-based architecture, IT departments can quickly “plug and unplug” databases into the container, Chaudhry said, as it significantly lowers memory utilization because there is no need for memory and background resources for each database instance.

Oracle Multitenant is a new feature of Oracle Database 12c, and allows each database plugged into the new architecture to look and feel like a standard Oracle Database to applications, so existing application can run unchanged.

With the new architecture, Chaudhry said administrators can batch-modify databases under the same container, doing away with the tedious and time-consuming method of modifying databases one by one.

Oracle said that by supporting multi-tenancy on the database tier, it makes all applications running on the Oracle Database ready for the cloud.

“The multitenant architecture provides virtually instantaneous provisioning and cloning of databases, which makes it an ideal platform for databases test and development clouds,” it noted.

To help customers efficiently manage more data, lower storage costs and improve database performance, Oracle Database 12c introduces new Automatic Data Optimization features.

A Heat Map monitors database read/write activity enabling Database Administrators to easily identify the data that is hot (very active), warm (read-only) and cold (rarely read) stored in tables and partitions.

Using smart compression and storage tiering, Database Administrators can easily define server managed policies to automatically compress and tier OLTP, Data Warehouse and Archive data based on the activity and age of data.

Chaudhry disclosed that the new Oracle Database 12c update is already available to old and new clients in the Philippines, where the software firm enjoys more than 50 percent share of the local database software systems market.

source: interaksyon.com

Rivals Microsoft and Oracle team up on push into cloud

SAN FRANCISCO/SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp said on Monday it would support Oracle Corp software on its cloud-based platforms, a tie-up aimed at improving the rivals’ chances against nimbler Web-based computing companies chipping away at their traditional businesses.

The two industry leaders have competed for decades to sell technology to the world’s largest companies. But they face growing pressure from new rivals selling often-cheaper services based in remote data centers, and they are rushing to adapt.

The two companies have long collaborated out of the public eye to meet customers’ needs, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on a conference call. “In the world of cloud computing, I think behind-the-scenes collaboration is not enough.”

The tie-up does not resolve major competitive challenges the two tech pioneers face in the cloud market, but their cooperation was seen as a symbolically important step.

“Is it a game changer today? Not at all. It shows both companies are serious about their cloud endeavors. The fact that historical competitors are now friends speaks to how big the cloud opportunity is. And it opens up potential avenues of growth down the road,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst at investment bank FBR.

Under the agreement, customers will be able to run Oracle software on Microsoft’s Server Hyper-V and on Windows Azure platforms, the companies said.

Microsoft will offer Oracle’s Java, Database and WebLogic Server to Windows Azure customers, while Oracle will also make Linux available to Windows Azure customers, the companies said in a news release.

Ironically, the pact means Microsoft is effectively promoting Linux and Java-based software, longtime rivals to its own Windows platform. But the software maker stands to benefit from getting any customer to pay for its datacenter services, regardless of the underlying software being used.

No. 3 software maker Oracle last week missed expectations for software sales for the fourth quarter, sending its shares plunging. Investors worried that the company may have trouble competing with software providers like Salesforce.com and Workday, as well as Amazon.com, which has also become a major player in cloud computing infrastructure.

Top software maker Microsoft’s large-scale cloud computing initiative, called Azure, has failed to catch up with Amazon’s cloud offering, called AWS (Amazon Web Services), which blazed the trail in elastic online computing services in the cloud.

The rivalry between Oracle and Microsoft dates back several decades and has been marked by a personal rivalry between the companies’ best-known cofounders: Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.

In 1995, as the Windows franchise was taking off, Ellison began a high-profile but unsuccessful effort to promote a less expensive competitor to the personal computer known as the Network Computer. Gates began aggressively attacking Oracle’s core database business in the late 1990s, infuriating Ellison as Microsoft’s less-expensive SQL Server gained market share.

In recent years, both have come under attack from a wave of younger companies, like Workday and Salesforce, which charge a single subscription fee for software and support, at far lower margins than for Oracle’s traditional products.

Ellison told analysts on last Thursday’s quarterly conference call that Oracle had forged alliances with Microsoft and Salesforce.com, which uses Oracle’s technology, and said he would announce details this week.

Over the past five years, shares of Amazon.com, which rents remote computing and storage to other companies, have surged 237 percent. Salesforce.com, founded by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, has risen 105 percent.

During the same half decade, Oracle’s stock has risen 38 percent and Microsoft’s shares are up 21 percent.

source: interaksyon.com

Oracle launches data center to cater demand from cloud customers

SINGAPORE – To meet the growing demand from customers for cloud-based services, as well as offering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), software giant Oracle launched on Thursday its own data center in the island city-state.

“The new Singapore data center is our latest data center investment in the fast-grwoing Asia Pacific market,” said Yen Yen Tan, senior vice president for application sales at Oracle Corporation Asia Pacific in a media briefing coinciding with the Oracle CloudWorld 2013 event here at the Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Center.

The enterprise software company said that the data center will provide their customers and partners subscription based, self service access to Oracle’s Fusion Applications — an open-standards based applications for business to maximize areas in enterprise resource planning, human capital and talent management, sales and marketing, and customer service and support.

“We are going to lead in the cloud space in Asia Pacific,” said Tan. “With our next generation of Fusion Applications now available in a hosted, subscription-based model, we are giving our customers the time-to-value and ease-of-use flexibility they’ve been waiting for.”

The new data center will use the company’s flagship systems for running critical business applications such as Oracle Engineered Systems, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle Exadata, which the tech provider described as pre-integrated IT infrastructure systems that are optimized for the enterprise space.

The company also said that they have created a cloud service that is modular, which is based on standard configurations so that customers can decide what they want to deploy –- as little data or as much data as they want.

“The enterprise cloud is helping businesses find efficiency and productivity gains through scalable, agile software solutions,” said Leslie Ong, managing director at Oracle Singapore. The new data center in Singapore underscores Oracle’s ongoing commitment to offering cloud solutions to our customers.”

Managed and supported by staff from Oracle, the data center will be housed at Equinix, a prime location for data centers in Singapore.

“We have chosen Singapore for this data center because of its excellent telecommunications infrastructure, efficient and well-qualified manpower,” said Ong.

source: interaksyon.com