Sonian's Cloud Buzz Blog

Oracle Magazine: Sharing Resources in the Cloud! But wait... didn't Larry Ellison Object to Cloud Computing?

  

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What caught my attention about the cover of the May/June 2010 issue of Oracle Magazine?  Iron Man.  What did I notice next?  The article about Cloud Computing, and not because I work for a cloud-based email archiving company, but because of what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said about Cloud Computing.  In an earlier post, The Top 10 Cloud Computing Topics of 2009, I quoted Larry Ellison saying:

"My objection to cloud computing is the [assertion] that cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present and the entire past... All it is, is a computer attached to a network."

Imagine my surprise to see one of the headlines on Oracle Magazine's cover read: "Sharing Resources in the Cloud."  If you take a look at the cover shot above, you can notice the headline by the nice blue pen circling it.  Much thanks to Jane for the penmanship, and for sending me the issue (and thanks to all of the friends and family who send me every cloud computing article they see because they know I work at a cloud computing company - A little bit of sarcasm there, but it honestly provides for great reading and good discussion material for this blog!).  So I dove into the article headfirst to see what, after all of Larry Ellison's opposition, would compel Oracle to put the cloud on their magazine's cover.  Half of the article was essentially a case study on how Oracle software allowed a flight school to integrate a public and private cloud system. 

Normally their wouldn't be much of a purpose to posting another company's case study, but some of the benefits experienced by Oracle's customer share a mutuality with the benefits Sonian customers see.  Let me summarize the Oracle article before giving my final thoughts on Oracle vs. The Cloud:

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Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University educates more than 35,000 students annually through over 170 different centers worldwide.  In addition, it offers online education and campus services and applications to employees and students.  With this geographic dispersal and multitude of online offerings, Embry-Riddle did the smart, economic thing by switching over to the cloud.  

By utilizing cloud tools, they now no longer have to worry about who owns whose data, security, or control.  Most companies are taking the same initiatives as Embry-Riddle, looking to optimize their organization's performance by taking advantage of the cloud.

Cloud-based software has significantly lightened the load of Embry-Riddle's IT departments.  The infrastructure provides a single log in process, after which not a single credential has to be presented.  Once into the system, that student or faculty member can be sent to their email, or use one of the online educational offerings, without having to continually prove their identity.  This is very similar to the end user experience of Sonian software users.  Eric Fisher, the Director of Middleware at the university, shared that "this virtual infrastructure minimizes the amount of support calls we receive from people trying to access their mail."  The 2000 account changes they manually had to implement used to take 24 hours, now Fisher and his team only take about 30 minutes to handle these activities with their automated software.  This is another statistic I found interesting as it was relatable to Sonian's offering.  In another popular blog post, written by Sonian CTO Greg Arnette, he brings up the fact that eDiscovery requests can take many long hours, even days, when IT has to search through back-up tapes.  However the same search that took over 12 hours, could have taken only a few seconds with a cloud-hosted solution like Sonian's.

The newfound flexibility and promise for Embry-Riddle has been thanks to Oracle solving the security and access issue surrounding the cloud.  Fisher stated "once you have worked out issues of identity and access control, obtaining services from a public cloud can be very cost effective.  The cloud provider already has the facilities, the bandwidth, the data storage - all of which we would have to duplicate ourselves to provide the same service.  Oracle has opened the door for us to utilize a lot more of these types of services in the future."  In the case of Sonian's customers, we utilize the cloud infrastructure for you.  This way, companies don't have to engage in a costly capital investment to replicate the server bandwidth, storage capabilities, and IT staff that cloud providers already have in place.