Page 19 - FCW, April 30, 2016

POWERPLAYER Gary Newgaard
SPONSORED REPORT
Group Vice President
Public Sector Hardware Sales, North America
Gary is a proven champion in organizational transformation with over 20 years of experience in developing and managing systems, strategies and storage portfolios.
Oracle Flexes Its Infrastructure Muscle in Public Sector
A seasoned IT executive, Gary Newgaard, guides the company’s venture into becoming a trusted converged infrastructure partner.
hen you think of Oracle, what comes to mind? If you said one of the
world’s biggest database and business software companies, you’d be correct.
However, that no longer tells the whole story. As
the IT ecosystem evolves and changes, so too must the user, the manager, and even the purveyor of IT.
Oracle sees countless opportunities within this new paradigm. With hard- ware and software markets splintered by takeovers and consolidation, Oracle is emerging as a trusted provider of converged infrastructure for federal, state and local governments.
For many, that’s still a buzzword,
but in fact it has a long history—at
least conceptually. Think back to the
days of the minicomputer in the 1980s.
Those systems also came with matched
storage and basic networking. In the
decades that followed, companies
would try to build end-to-end IT by
integrating mainframes, personal com-
puters, servers, storage and different
operating systems to meet increasing computing de- mands. This followed right through to current web-based environments.
Gary Newgaard has witnessed this evolution over more than 20 years in the IT business. Now as Oracle’s Group Vice President of Public Sector Infrastructure Sales across North America, he’s spearheading the company’s push into a government space that still mostly sees his company as a software vendor.
“The cloud is the biggest driver of change in IT today”, says Newgaard. Public sector organizations, just
as those in private industry, are trying to provide their customer-constituents the most powerful, flexible and cost-effective IT available.
CLOUD FIRST?
Most organizations now acknowledge a complete cloud strategy includes both private clouds and public clouds in a hybrid environment. The combination of both cloud models helps agencies find
the greatest operational efficiencies and lowest costs. Many agencies have looked to develop applications in a private cloud on-premise behind the agency firewall, then move those applications to the public cloud. Yet others have looked at the exact opposite.
Security concerns with public cloud have held many back. Most public cloud provid- ers use a mix of different products, archi- tectures and standards in their solutions and the integrations between these technologies may result in vulnerabilities that might be exploited. There also can be a significant lack of visibility for government leaders into the overall security and performance
of these offerings. That leaves government officials to craft complex SLA’s to measure cloud providers’ delivery of acceptable levels of service.
CONVERGENCE IS THE ANSWER
Oracle is already one of the world’s largest providers of Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. The company attacks the cloud dilemma with both private and public cloud offerings that use the same technology, and in many instances can be configured identically between cloud and on-premises. It’s built from the ground up
“As the IT ecosystem
evolves and changes, so too must the user, the manager,
and even the purveyor of IT.”