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CIO Pakistan had a quick conversation with Sajid Akbar, Country Manager, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Pakistan and SAGE West.

Q. There is a lot of talk about cloud computing changing the business landscape. Why do you see it becoming so popularâ€"and is it simply yet another fad?
Cloud computing is getting increasingly popular, especially among organizations of all sizes as it enables users to connect with the required IT environment without huge investment on IT infrastructure. Cloud computing provides on-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources and is a natural evolution of datacenter trends including virtualization, consolidation, and shared services.

It promises to deliver a number of very significant benefitsâ€"and many of our customers are already realizing these benefits. The benefits of cloud are many, significant, and deliver value to both IT organizations as well as the lines of business. The benefits include lower datacenter costs, significantly reduced environmental impact, and the ability to capture more of the opportunities that markets present through increased agility in resource deployment, and dramatically reduced time to market.

Forrester Research predicts that, by the year 2020, enterprises will be investing more than US$241 billion in cloud computing each year â€" that’s six times what they’re spending today.

Cloud computing presents an opportunity for IT organizations to add dramatic value to the business and the growing popularity of this ready on demand access to IT environment is vital for entrepreneurs without procuring expensive equipment and deployment of physical network.

Q . So what you are suggesting is not merely a new vocabulary, but a shift on how organizations think about IT?
Absolutely! Cloud computing is a new way of thinking as well as a new way of delivering IT. It requires a paradigm shift in how the enterprise structures and allocates its IT resources, how it builds applications and manages its key business processes, how it collaborates and develops interfaces; and how it secures and manages its infrastructure.
Q. So what does Oracle have to offer towards cloud computing?

Oracle has developed high performance machines which are being enabled with technologies that are equipped in a single box for cost effective and energy efficient solutions. Oracle platform offers various technologies in the data center in a way that multiple users of enterprises can access and can share the application mutually. Also, a third party vendor buys infrastructure and help other firms to work with it.

The two most popular and efficient machines developed by Oracle are Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine which are being deployed widely across the world.

Q. Your latest offering Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is among the most deployed all-in-one box solutions. Would you tell us a bit about it?

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the world’s first and only integrated cloud machine â€" hardware and software engineered together to provide a “cloud in a box”. Exalogic is designed to revolutionize data center consolidation, enabling enterprises to bring together tens, hundreds, or even thousands of disparate, mission-critical, performance-sensitive workloads with maximum reliability, availability, and security. Oracle Exalogic’s unique high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric means that complex, distributed applications can run with a responsiveness simply not achievable with typical servers used in data centers today.

The Oracle Exalogic’s extreme performance, massive scale, and hardware-based application isolation make it the ideal platform for consolidating many existing applications on a single platform. Applications can be migrated unchanged and then run with higher performance and reliability at a cost that can be as much as 60 percent lower than for traditional environments.

By consolidating applications to Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, enterprises can accelerate the performance of Java applications by as much as 14x, improve reliability and scalability beyond even the most mission-critical requirements and reduce deployment effort by up to 95% while reducing costs by as much as 60%.

Q. What in your opinion seems to be the key challenges in adopting cloud computing platform? And how should an enterprise provide resources for its applications?
One of the key problems is that datacenters have traditionally been built around individual applications, with each application relying on its own, allocated proprietary stack of technologies, such as hardware, operating system, database, application server, and portal. Thus today’s datacenters suffer from “vertical technology silo obesity”. As a result, the majority of the IT organizations’ efforts are spent ensuring that proprietary stacks are up and running, leaving only a small amount of resources left to create value through innovation.

Cloud Computing requires a paradigm shift in how the enterprise structures and allocates its IT resources, how it builds applications and manages its key business processes, how it collaborates and develops interfaces; and how it secures and manages its infrastructure.

Q. But wouldn’t that traditionally be solved through virtualization?
Applying virtualization to this datacenter landscape adds benefits, but only temporarily. What is needed instead is a new way of laying out the datacenter landscape and provisioning the applications with the appropriate supporting technologiesâ€"it is a paradigm shift that transforms the datacenter from a morass of different, proprietary, and expensive-to-maintain vertical stacks of technology to standardized and consolidated horizontal resource pools that can support many, if not all, applications with resources dynamically allocated to applications when demanded. When an application demands additional resources due to an increase or spike of demand, these are made available in minutes or even seconds instead of weeks or months.

Q. How does Oracle help organizations to overcome these challenges?
Oracle’s cloud computing strategy is to deliver complete, integrated and end-to-end product suites on an open, standards-based middleware and database architecture. Oracle’s approach helps customers to simplify computing environments, lower cost and risk, and provides greater choice and flexibility.

Middleware is an ideal area within the enterprise IT architecture to take advantage of the grid/cloud benefits of efficiency and flexibility. As the layer of infrastructure just below applications and SOA services, middleware provides the right level of granularity of resources to be pooled and shared to enable desired control without undesired complexity.

In contrast to the traditional “stack” approach to middleware architecture, an application grid infrastructure allows different resources at the application server level such as object memory to be shared, allocated, and dynamically adjusted across a set of application needs. This approach makes enterprise IT infrastructure elastic so that it can grow incrementally, as well as provide the flexibility to move resources around in order to meet dynamic business priorities.

The foundational technologies within OFM, including Weblogic Server, JRockit, Coherence, and Tuxedo, provide the most advanced cloud-enabling middleware infrastructure in the industry.

Q. How do these solutions handle transaction processing and memory management?
The cloud requires elastic, instead of static, availability of processing power. At the same time, clouds need to provide processing power at tremendous scale. Such elasticity and scale can only be delivered through a pool of high-performance transaction processing servers and memory management servers.

Oracle WebLogic Server, the market-leading application server in the world in terms of performance, is the fundamental building block for delivering the scale, high performance, and resource pooling capabilities demanded by cloud computing. In parallel to requiring dynamically provisioned processing power at tremendous scale, cloud computing also requires memory resourced dynamically and at tremendous scale.

While Oracle WebLogic Server provides the processing power, Oracle Coherence provides elastic memory capacity at tremendous scale. And finally, we put an end to the continuous defining, configuring, and tuning of proprietary systems with Oracle’s Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a complete system of hardware and software engineered together to deliver the most scalable, highest-performance building block for cloud computing.

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