Still need an entry here or on the previous slide.Something like “ I usually like to start this type of discussion with a little background … “Back in …..”Entry message for IT organizations is that it’s as much a business directive as it is a technological capability. Cloud initiatives will be successful if organizations take the time to recognize that changes to business processes and approaches go hand in hand with technology deployments. The entry slide establishes that these issues have been around for a long time .. In fact, Oracle recognized the need way back in 1999 and has been steadily progressing on this front leveraging new and improved technologies along the way.First stage was in fact App/Infra consolidation: A brute force effort driven by a business need.Second stage was commodity hardware deployment supported by automation and consolidated processes. This commodity approach though had the side affect of increasing capitol and operational expenses (space, power, …)Third stage is to leverage next generation strategies around capacity management, automation and infrastructure compressionThis is where the Cloud comes in… The goal is simple:Reduce capitol expenditure by leveraging existing compute/storage resources more effectivelyReduce operating expenditure by lowering effective support per compute unit and reducing power and a space needs
We believe that enterprises are on a JOURNEY to cloud computing. Most will EVOLVE their current IT infrastructure to become more “cloud-like” – to become a better internal service provider to the lines of business, BUs, departments – to provide greater agility and responsiveness to business needs, higher quality of service in terms of latency & availability, and lower costs and higher utilization. This evolution will take time. Not only is the available technology evolving and advancing, but enterprises are also working on the new policies and processes needed. In many cases, the technical building blocks for cloud computing are available in advance of enterprise readiness, so we think that enterprises will evolve towards the right at different rates. The first step that many enterprises are taking is to move from a “Silo’ed” environment to a “Grid” or virtualized environment. Most datacenters still have dedicated silo’s where each application runs on its own middleware, database, servers and storage. Each silo is sized for peak load, so there’s inherently a lot of excess capacity built in. Each silo is also different, leading to complexity and high costs to manage. Many organizations are moving from these silos to a virtual environment with shared services, dynamic provisioning and standardized configurations or appliances. This trend is very strong right now. Probably 80-90% of the companies I talk to are doing some form of consolidation right now, but they may be doing in only a portion of their datacenter, maybe 20-30%, so there’s more to do.From here, enterprises can evolve to a self-service private cloud with automated scaling (called policy-based resource management on the chart) and chargeback. Not every application benefits from self-service and elastic scalability, but some do, so enterprise are figuring that out and moving those first. Some organizations are not ready to implement full self-service, since that requires new policies and processes to be defined, and they may prefer allocation to pay-per-use chargeback models. There may be other challenges including gaining cross-organizational support, creating the business case and funding model, and various cultural issues.For these reasons, each organization needs to create its own roadmap plan, and to decide what to move where and when. For many, the first step in the path to cloud computing is Consolidation.
