Oracle OpenWorld is an annual convention that happens across the world covering major economic centers of the world and bringing together top Oracle executives, business decision makers, IT management and line of business end users

Sangram Aglave from BW BusinessWorld met James Stanbridge at the Oracle’s mega event, Oracle OpenWorld 2017 held at New Delhi on 9th May 2017. James Stanbridge is Oracle’s VP for Infrastructure as a Service platform.

He is responsible for product management, product strategy, roadmap, and go-to-market initiatives for Oracle Infrastructure as a Service product family for EMEA and Asia regions at Oracle. Excerpts from an interview:

BW: What is Oracle doing to attract independent software vendors to choose Oracle as their platform of choice to develop, test and run their production loads on Oracle’s Infrastructure as a Service platform?

James Stanbridge: India has a rich history of independent software vendors. ISVs require an enterprise grade cloud platform to develop their applications, test them and subsequently deploy production workloads.

Oracle is the first and the only cloud built for the Enterprise from the ground up. Choosing Oracle cloud would bring down the time to market as ISVs don’t have to spend a lot of resources on integration and bringing various Enterprise grade functionality together like governance, security, performance, administration, monitoring, data jurisdiction, analytics, etc., Yellow dog, an ISV and alumnus of the Oracle startup incubator program, deals in the arbitrage of compute power.

They are now an Oracle customer and in the business of aggregating compute demand and brokerage that load across clouds (Google, AWS, Azure, Oracle and others) with an objective to deliver the best price performance.

So, this is what Yellow dog does. Let’s assume you are a video rendering company requiring 1,000 cores for about 8 hours; instead of buying those what Yellow dog does is to route that load to a high-performance compute through their real-time algorithms. Oracle is in partner network of Yellow dog are competing with other cloud providers to get more and more compute loads to our Cloud.

BW: Can you give some quantitative benchmarks around cloud latency?

James Stanbridge: The most modern infrastructure is based on a regional model and the region follows the data jurisdiction. The world is divided into regions like the US, Europe or countries in Asia. The latency between the regions is going to be a 100 milli-seconds, but the really mind-blowing numbers are in between availability domains within a region.

A region is a localized geographic area, and an Availability Domain is one or more data centers located within a region. A region is composed of around three Availability Domains. Those availability domains are joined to each other by Oracle owned 2x 25 GB dark fiber which allows for running truly real time database applications across those availability domains.

For e.g., latency in between Availability Domains is 500 micro seconds and 100 micros seconds within nodes belonging to a single Availability Domains. That is almost equivalent to a blink of eye or the speed of thought.

BW: Does compute gravity exist like what some thought leaders speak about data gravity in context of enterprise applications?

James Stanbridge: The objective function for the enterprise buyers is bring down the enterprise IT risk. Then, they want to worry about performance or price. Once the risk is factored in; conversations move to a discussion on performance and price, and that’s what starts moving the needle on the dial and determines things like data gravity and compute gravity.

It depends on business to business -- which one between performance and price matters the most within an enterprise. If you are a video rendering house; then performance will carry the more weightage on deciding on compute gravity and that determines data gravity.

BW: Can you share some IaaS industry and customer profiles, and their primary reasons to choose Oracle’s IaaS cloud?

James Stanbridge: The primary decision factor is always “risk”. It does not matter who I speak to. There has been an investment in hardware and software 6-10 years ago, which really, has not kept pace with rapid innovations in the marketplace. So, CTOs are looking at soon to be or already out of warranty hardware.

They don’t know when their legacy hardware is going to fail. They are also looking at software with versions that are way out of support. Therefore, 2-3 years ago, we have started seeing a huge uptake of the cloud systems because now, the CTOs and CIOs see a dollar amount of IT risk if they continue with their legacy hardware and software.

The second driver is to get out of the CAPEX model as budgets are getting constrained. We see CIOs really want to get into a OPEX model. That’s where Oracle single stack brings value as customers choose to have the same hardware and software running on their public cloud or within their firewall. Customer are wary of license lock-in, vendor lock-in. We see more and more customers choosing cloud for being able to try out different vendors for different workloads.

BW: What is the value that Oracle IaaS brings to the SME customers?

James Stanbridge: If the SME is already an Oracle customer, for e.g., if they already have an Oracle database or Oracle ERP applications; then it’s going to be easy for them to move their workloads to the Oracle cloud.

While some drivers for moving to the cloud will be same for a large enterprise and an SME, for e.g., CAPEX/OPEX, legacy systems, etc., What is encouraging is that around 40 percent of IaaS customers are first time Oracle customers. So, Oracle is really filling enterprise infrastructure white spaces in a way.

BW: What is Oracle’s strategy to become a leader in the IaaS market?

James Stanbridge: I am actually relatively comfortable given that we are differentiated and niche since we are first and the only enterprise cloud built from the ground up. There isn’t anyone except Oracle in this market and I think that’s working really well for Oracle.