Winning a Computing Vendor Excellence Award highlights 'how serious Oracle is about converged infrastructure'

'Winning the award is an important part of Oracle's strategy,' says John Abel

The importance of Oracle winning the Converged Infrastructure Award at Computing's inaugural Vendor Excellence Awards was not lost on John Abel, the company's engineered systems and public technology cloud leader for UK, Ireland and Israel.

"It's great, it's one of those [awards lists] where you want to be specific about which categories and products you want to go for as we have so many at Oracle, and it's an important award to win," he told Computing.

The firm's Virtual Compute Appliance X5 picked up the award, fighting off fierce competition from some of the best converged infrastructure solutions on the market. Commenting on the solution itself, Abel said that it was rare to have a product that ticked so many of the customers' boxes, adding that "winning the award is an important part of Oracle's strategy".

Oracle was one of the big-name vendors that attended the awards ceremony held at London's fabulous Royal Garden Hotel, and Abel explained that since the event, the product has been renamed as Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) - but emphasised that nothing else about the product has changed.

Abel said that the winning award highlights to Oracle's customers that the US tech giant is very serious about the converged infrastructure area of the industry.

"What's even more important is that we're not just known for our software technology but for our engineered systems - and the two elements of our strategy that is spearheading where our company goes in the future is engineered systems, of which PCA is one family member, and also the public cloud," he stated.

He added that the award means that the firm will be able to boost PCA's profile in the market.

"Customers have multiple ways of finding out what's happening in industry - so having this type of award gives us the ability to share with them what we're doing," he said.

"What PCA gives the customer is a consolidated platform for Oracle or non-Oracle applications database technology - it's the only one that we have in our arsenal of engineered systems that runs Windows, Solaris and Linux, and most of the next generation of IT people want this ability to be hypervisor-by-default, and to have a consolidated cost of their IT platform. That's what PCA gives in every element of the architecture, meaning existing customers get the benefits of deeper consolidation, free virtualisation and an operating system because we don't charge for that on any of our engineering systems," he said.

According to Abel, the cloud market is maturing beyond what he calls microcloud solutions from the likes of Salesforce.com, Workday and even some of the firms that Oracle has acquired.

"This is what I call cloud version one ... and CFOs, CIOs and CEOs can see the immediate benefits in these microclouds because they can take an autonomous part of their business into something that costs less," he suggested.

This year the market has developed into what Abel calls the enterprise cloud or "version two".

"Things like security, integration, and private clouds become a real core part of the cloud experience and also the way that IT and procurement teams work has changed because no longer are businesses owning a whole asset, you're owning a partial asset," he said.

Abel explained that Oracle wants to be at the forefront of "version 3 of the cloud".

This would be where users can benefit from being able to switch data from private and public cloud immediately.

"What if regulation comes in which means [your data] has to go private, we've seen it with PCI compliance and healthcare, so it's about having that advantage of switching this straight away," he added.

With the PCA, Abel claimed that Oracle could manage public and private cloud the same way using Oracle Enterprise Manager.

"What we need to manage the public cloud is the same tool - the experience of the IT professional is the same," he said.