Page 20 - FCW, April 30, 2016

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with hardware tuned to run Oracle software for optimum performance, scale and end-to-end security.
There is an even greater challenge for application devel- opers. If the public cloud environment is so much different from the on-premises systems they used to develop their applications—itself likely a mix of different technologies— they can’t be certain those applications will work for their
The surprise for many is likely to be Oracle’s emergence as a hardware company, along with its status as a software and solutions provider. This evolution began after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and included the Sun family of servers and storage that were already a standard in many government agencies. The Java development language also came with that acquisition.
At the time, the merger was puzzling to many observers. How would Oracle make any money selling Sun systems? Instead, over the next five years, Oracle invested as much
as $10 billion in R&D to build a converged infrastructure leveraging the Sun intellectual property designed to squeeze the maximum value from an organization’s use of Oracle software.
“Everything we are selling today is designed to interoperate, run faster and run better, in the least expensive manner without human intervention needed to tune and tweak it,” says Newgaard. “That simply wasn’t there five years ago.”
It starts at the chip level. Oracle has continued to use
the SPARC RISC-based architecture first made to run Sun servers. The latest version revealed last year, the 32-core M7 microprocessor, includes SQL database features in silicon, which dramatically accelerates some data functions. It also includes Silicon Secured Memory to help protect against both malware and flawed program code, and has integrated hardware-assisted encryption.
The end-to-end security provided throughout Oracle’s converged infrastructure, known as the Red Stack,
is what Newgaard calls the “table stakes” everyone should expect if they want to operate in a highly
secure manner, without going to third-party products. The entire, integrated stack runs from the operating systems—Oracle’s own version of Linux, Solaris and VMWare—up through the compute, network, storage, backup and archiving resources. Hardware includes SPARC-based servers, other Oracle-engineered systems, and storage systems.
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In his decades of working with and selling solutions to government, Newgaard said he has never deviated from a lesson he learned very early in his career. It’s one he expects will work well with the portfolio of public sector converged infrastructure solutions for which he’s now responsible at Oracle.
“I learned that the coveted position in government for
any manufacture or sales person is to be a trusted partner,
to become a part of the decision-making process. It’s a coveted position that’s hard to get, but really easy to lose,” he says. “If you lose focus through trying to do some kind hard sell because of a need to make some quarterly goal, it becomes very apparent you’re not as much interested in your customer’s success as you are in your own.”
To that end, the vast technology resources a company such as Oracle can only be an asset. “At the end of the day,” Newgaard said, “my success is predicated on my customer’s success.”
agency users as expected. Conversely, without visibility into the public cloud environment, applications developed there will have different results when production is moved to on-premises government computers.
Oracle addresses that problem by uniquely providing conti- nuity between the public cloud and private clouds for agency developers. If an application is developed on the private cloud, it will run the same way in Oracle’s public cloud. Applications and data can move seamlessly from one to the other.
“Everything we are selling today is designed to interoperate, run faster and run better, in the least expensive manner without human intervention needed to tune and tweak it.”—Gary Newgaard