Oracle ASEAN Systems Sales VP on how data centre optimisation strategy can help firms

Following is an interview with Oracle ASEAN Systems Sales VP Ron Goh who says Oracle’s Data Centre Optimisation strategy can help organisations automate and simplify the management of the data centre assets’ lifecycle to increase IT operations agility and efficiency while minimising operational costs. Following are excerpts from the interview:

Q: What is an optimised data centre? What advantage do they have over traditional data centres?

A: The Oracle Optimised Data Centre is a strategic roadmap for organisations to implement a service infrastructure that is not only cost-effective but truly dynamic, helping organisations come up with innovative new products and services.

Current data centre operations are unsustainable and often fail to meet the needs of growing businesses even after spending up to 80% of IT budgets, just sustaining current operations. Today’s data centres are like technology museums – they have one of every piece of hardware ever created and some applications that are over 15 years old.

The pressure to keep the lights on and maintain current SLAs leave little time for transformational change. Transformation may sound scary and full of risks but the proven solutions and products from Oracle can help organisations transform and deliver a new level of operations faster than they thought.

Oracle’s Optimised Data Centre combines the best-in-class products, solutions, and technologies, engineered together to create the most effective data centre implementations. By providing a fully integrated stack, ‘from applications to disk’, the data centre is greatly simplified while integration is already built-in.

Data centre optimisation has allowed Oracle to transform its own data centre infrastructure and has proven essential in the organisation’s ability to grow, innovate and deliver unique products to the market.

Q: How can businesses benefit from data centre optimisation?

A: Based on open standards, data centre optimisation addresses customers’ need for flexibility and is easy to adapt to work with existing Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.

Using Optimised Data Centre, organisations can transform their infrastructure into a dynamic data centre capable of delivering cloud services and flexible compute, storage and application services.

The number one inhibitor that companies face around driving innovation is time which is directly related to the amount of resources spent on maintenance. Oracle Optimised Data Centre eliminates IT complexity and frees up more resources to focus on core business innovations while reducing the operational cost significantly.

Organisations can use the savings from decreased integration costs and more powerful, flexible systems to take advantage of innovations in areas like mobile, social media and big data. Evolving from old infrastructure into a new standardised efficient data centre will enable new services like virtualisation and cloud resulting in faster responses to user needs and allowing to entertain more requests while still having time to innovate new services.

Q: What are the challenges for the organisations in (country) looking to optimise their data centre? What should they do to overcome these challenges?

A: Managing cost and complexity of continuous growth coupled with high costs of IT integration are the main problems for businesses. Moreover, they have to face problems of enhancing efficiency and flexibly responding to new factors including mobility, big data, security, and compliance while maintaining business continuity.

Today, 80% of the budget goes towards maintaining current operations. By 2014, only one in 10 organisations will invest in innovation as a core function. By 2020, IT departments will need to manage 10 times more servers, 50 times more data and 75 times more files, but with increase of only 50% in IT personnel.

Complexity will increase manifolds with globalisation, mobile devices and big data which will consume a lot of resources, time and money and inhibit growth and innovation. The complexity of system integration between various functions in a company normally consumes a lot of time and expenses alike for achieving maximum targets. It is due to the fact that separate systems are dedicated for various functions with diversified technologies.

Oracle’s Data Centre Optimisation strategy can help organisations to automate and simplify the management of the data centre assets lifecycle to increase IT operations agility and efficiency while minimising operational costs.

Only Oracle integrates unique innovation at every layer of the stack across its systems and software portfolio, to help customers transform their existing infrastructure into a truly optimised data centre enabling them to accelerate business innovation.

By choosing Oracle as partner to deliver products and technologies as the base of their new model of operations, organisations can significantly reduce costs by taking advantage of the pre-integration we do as part of product development.

Q: What are the potential sectors in (country) for optimised data centre?

A: Optimised data centre is indispensable for corporations dealing with huge amount of data serving millions of customers. Telecom, media, government and financial services sectors have always been the early adopters for new IT technologies and optimised data centre should be one of their key investments in coming years.

By optimising their data centres, the organisations in these sectors can introduce new products and services to address dynamic business needs and stay competitive and profitable.