n THE GRILL | JUDSON ALTHOFF with the chip giant which is the backbone of our engineered systems. We believe x86 should be competent in engineered systems and not become a major focus for us. We are truly the only vendor with Intellectual Property (IP). HP has no IP as their IP is Red Hat, Intel and VMware are fast losing their value to customer. We have more than 40 percent share of the entire enterprise software market. Increasing our hardware business over and above our software dominance will squarely put us on top, while we stay profitable.
For an SI with an ‘end-to-end’ portfolio, we are the best partner as there are fewer moving parts and fewer areas of failure.
Partners in India disillusioned by the Heritage Sun strategy are either shifting their business to competition or continue remain unsure of selling Sun portfolio. Comment. To be fair, we took longer time in India and I do understand their impatience. The Sparc T-series servers are the best in class. There is nothing superior than to sell Oracle software under Oracle hardware. We have invested in Sun ZFS series which competes with storage leaders like NetApp. For server-storage attach ratio, ‘Oracle on Oracle’ solutions means that superior proactive customer support than rely on cross-engineering competitors, though EMC/NetApp claim to be well certified on HP/IBM servers. Finally, there is no better DB solution than Exadata. I request partners to give a second thought to our extensive R&D and consistent partner strategy around hardware.
in the top five. Is Sun (now Oracle) fast losing its shine? I am quite bullish on hardware business. Let me tell you why. I think some of these reports are a bit misleading as they tend to report holistically on the server landscape. From a unit volume stand-point, even perhaps from a revenue perspective, we would never be number one in that landscape. We specifically do not compete in the commodity market, which consists of single digit margin in the x86 businesses. The real innovator is Intel and we have a close alliance
SaaS, social media, cloud and BYOD. Are these tech trends on the hype-cycle or do you see adoption by enterprises? There is a certain amount of hype, stickiness and fad around these words. However, cloud brings a new IT delivery paradigm but it won’t be the only answer. The cloud provides simplistic way to deliver standard IT services to the market quickly and at a low cost. Applications like HR and CRM would move to the cloud for most enterprises. The trick will be wiring those cloud services back to the infrastructure, and partners have a huge role in developing these services. BYOD is fairly immature. It’s a big part of the Java strategy to move data (encrypted at our end) from laptop to mobile devices. The estimated explosion of mobile devices from three
16
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2012
billion to 50 billion in next couple of years will be a big opportunity. What makes Oracle a favored vendor for ISVs and systems integrators? It was fundamentally anchored around writing applications of ISVs around our database. We have grown into a true comprehensive platform—from middleware to DB, infrastructure layer, virtualization and down to server and storage. We are certifying ISVs on engineering systems like Exadata and Exalogic under the Exastack program. We have doubled ISV business over the last couple of years. Our expertise in Java enables us to be the only company to provide technology from the device back to the datacenter. Billions of devices produce data and is classified as big data, which we manage at the back-end. Unlike our competitors, we do not really invest in consultancy. Oracle in the last eight years, through all the acquisitions, has grown in terms of product portfolio, but the consulting resource numbers are relatively flat. With OPN, we are getting SIs specialized in role-specific training to help incubate their business. With Oracle spearheading diverse technologies, partners are compelled to increase T&C. What ROI can they anticipate for a long-term profitable partnership? It depends on the scope and scale of the partners. We have many boutique partners. And larger partners, capable of competencies in application to disk, are extremely profitable. It is a unique value-proposition to deliver end-toend solution, and we lead the way. Other companies claim to be endto-end vendors too. For an SI with end-to-end solutions in their portfolio, we are the best partner as there are fewer moving parts and fewer areas of failures.The new partner program provides good margins for selling right products in right markets. More programs for cloud opportunities will be launched. Our big data strategy includes Exadata and BI like Exalytics through acquired Hyperion assets which we engineered for real time Analytics. There lies the big money for partners. —Yogesh Gupta