Light-Speed Performance
Continued
The major impact of Oracle Exadata for LGR, Hartley believes, is going to be the ways in which LGR packages and sells its product. Being able to bundle hardware and software together as a single, commercial, off-the-shelf solution transforms LGR from a software provider to an end-to-end solutions provider, making it an even more valuable partner to its customers. “We haven’t had to change our code at all to offer these new [Oracle] Exadata systems to our customers,” says Salmon. “We literally hand the technology straight on to the customer, and the customer gets the advantage. They are lining up for this product, and we are already working on a number of high-profile installations around the globe.”
“We now have a solution neatly packaged inside a box with guaranteed performance at levels far exceeding anything anybody else can provide—and far exceeding what our customers require, both now and even in five years’ time” says Hartley. “With Oracle Exadata’s prepackaged combination, we can configure and drop a solution into a customer’s data center with minimal disruption and have it up and running in a matter of weeks. In the past, we’ve delivered anything from a 300 percent to 550 percent ROI to our leading customers. With Oracle Exadata, we will be able to dramatically increase these already impressive numbers.”
In addition to performance and rapid gains in ROI, LGR’s experience with Oracle Exadata highlights how effective the solution is for Oracle-oriented enterprises, especially when compared with other high-end proprietary data warehousing platforms. It already benefits LGR, which can capitalize on its Oracle knowledge and leverage existing skill sets.
“There’s a learning curve associated with supporting customized customer solutions. But with Oracle Exadata, we can easily leverage our Oracle knowledge in a consistent way across customer deployments,” says Hartley. “One of the key messages our customers are sending back to us is that they love Oracle because everyone knows Oracle. When we do a search for qualified Oracle professionals, we can find 300 people that are right for the job compared to about 3 for Teradata platforms. It’s literally a ratio of 100 to 1 in terms of finding the right support staff. Oracle Exadata is a win-win-win for everyone—Oracle, us, and our customers.”
Pointing the Way to the Future
Oracle’s primary focus for now is applying Oracle Exadata solutions to the data warehousing market, but its potential doesn’t stop there. “The HP Oracle Database Machine and the Oracle Exadata Storage Server can be used to run any Oracle database application with any type of workload,” says Mendelsohn. “You can run SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, or whatever you want. It will all run on the HP Oracle Database Machine.
For now, Oracle Exadata provides immediate, huge performance benefits for any organization that wants to expand, upgrade, or implement a data warehouse.
“We now have the most scalable solution in the industry. Customers can feel confident that as they go from today’s data warehouses to the multipetabyte data warehouses of the future, we have a technology that’s going to scale with them as their data needs grow,” says Mendelsohn. “Oracle Exadata users can feel confident that they have the right technology to move them into the future.”
For More Information
Oracle Exadata
Oracle Data Warehousing
David A. Kelly is a business/technology writer who writes frequently for
Profit.
