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Estimated reading time: 1 minute
My Infrastructure’s Journey to the Cloud
Cloud is about making your IT infrastructure simpler and more efficient. But while it presents opportunities, it also brings challenges. This collection of articles and opinion pieces has been gathered to help you examine these infrastructure issues and choose which path is best for your organization.
From interviews with Oracle experts to customer success stories, we explore how Oracle is transforming organizations on their infrastructure’s journey to the cloud.
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
The Power of the Cloud
The digital economy is challenging leaders everywhere to move to a more nimble platform to accelerate innovation and slash costs. In a word, cloud.
Some start by moving from traditional on-premises application software to modern software as a service (SaaS), creating a modern platform for business process innovation. Others are using the power of the cloud to build a platform for harnessing the value of information in all its forms: data, analytics, and creating new applications. Others still are focused on using cloud infrastructure models to power their digital organizations.
All three platforms are essential for success in the digital economy, and create unique digital agility when they work as one.
In this ebook, we focus specifically on cloud infrastructure, and the ways that digital leaders are progressively moving their organizations through this modernization. The journey may not be simple nor short, but many are finding it worth the effort.
Safe travels on your cloud journey.
Chuck
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Accenture and Oracle: A Strategy for Cloud Success
With more than 120 partner awards for excellence to its name, Accenture has become the world’s largest integrator of Oracle infrastructure, platform services, and cloud applications.
Now, Accenture and Oracle have a joint go-to-market initiative—the Accenture Oracle Business Group (AOBG)—helping Fortune 500 clients across industries such as government, finance, energy, and public services accelerate their digital transformation.
We caught up with Pat Sullivan, managing director of Accenture’s Oracle Technology Practice, to find out more about the organization, and how they’re helping clients develop strategies for both on-premises and cloud deployments.
Tell us about the relationship between Accenture and Oracle, and how your partnership has evolved over time.
“Accenture and Oracle have had a partnership for more than two decades, and over that time, we’ve worked on the full suite of Oracle products. As technology has progressed, we’ve built our practice. We’re now 52,000 people across the globe, serving our clients on a daily basis by implementing Oracle solutions. In 2015, we launched the Accenture Oracle Business Group, which is a one-of-a-kind initiative, jointly focused on delivering Oracle Cloud solutions.
In 2014, Accenture acquired Enkitec, bringing Enkitec’s substantial expertise and experience to bear for our Oracle clients. At that time, we were focused on building an Oracle Engineered Systems practice—which we brought to the market and had great success with. Moving forward, this same group is now leading our practices in terms of migrating our clients’ workloads to the cloud.”
Accenture and Oracle clearly complement one another, so where are the lines of responsibility and where do you come together?
“Accenture and Oracle complement each other right across our partnership. Very simply put, Oracle makes the product (the hardware, the software, and now the cloud services), and Accenture works to implement them at our clients. We do this in a variety of ways, both from a commercial and technical perspective, to minimize risks and accelerate delivery.”
What are the biggest challenges your clients face in their journey to the cloud?
“Moving to the cloud presents our clients with some pretty big challenges, but also some pretty big opportunities. It transforms their workforce and enables them to build new models that allow them to compete in the new digital era.
Becoming a digital business isn’t simply about implementing a whole host of new technologies; the challenge is in how cloud is re-creating the workforce and allowing our clients to become innovators in the digital space. Our consultants are working with our clients on the commercial impacts of the cloud and also on the technical implementation of cloud across their enterprise.”
Oracle is the only vendor that offers the same technology on premises and in the cloud, enabling a more seamless transition for customers.
Which big issue keeps CIOs awake at night?
“CIOs are concerned about data. CIOs have more data to work with than ever before. It’s not unheard of for data to grow at a double-digit rate, if not double in size on an annual basis. CIOs are concerned about how to store data, analyze it, integrate it, even manage it today.”
Based on your experience of implementing enterprise-scale cloud solutions for Fortune 500 clients, what is the one piece of advice you’d give every client when they begin their cloud journey?
“The advice we give our clients is to start a journey to the cloud with a strategic plan and roadmap. This approach allows our clients to understand what they can actually achieve as well as their readiness to take on cloud technology. Accenture has developed a cloud assessment toolkit, designed to help them fully understand not only where they are today, but where they want to be in the future. And, most importantly, how to get there.
Our cloud assessment toolkit looks at everything. From a technical perspective, we look at where the client is today—what extensions and customizations they have in place, where their data sits, and how that maps to the ‘to be’ platform or the cloud environment they’re moving to.
From a business perspective, our assessment looks at governance and the effect this has on data storage. These are the type of things that our clients depend on us to help them understand. We gather a lot of data to help our clients establish the best way to proceed, as well as the best way to plan their journey to the cloud.
We’re constantly evolving our assessment process. The more cloud implementations we do, the more information we feed back into the tool to allow us to guide our clients on the best way to make their cloud journey.”
How do you see the relationship between Oracle and Accenture developing in the future?
“Our partnership with Oracle is evolving and getting stronger all the time. The relationship between us must continue to evolve, especially in the world of cloud. Because Accenture works with our clients to implement Oracle Cloud solutions, we’re constantly feeding back to Oracle, helping improve their products and cloud services, so we can jointly go to market and better serve our clients.
Accenture expects Oracle to stay relevant in this changing marketplace and, most importantly, to innovate—especially as the market continues to move toward cloud. As Oracle’s top implementation partner globally and as an early adopter of their technologies, we’re continuing to work jointly with them to help clients move across large-scale cloud projects that transform their organization.”
Accenture is the only Oracle partner to operate a joint digital business group, and is widely recognized by industry analysts IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and PAC as a leading global Oracle implementation and managed services systems integrator. During 2016, it received 17 Oracle awards, including these three prestigious global Oracle Excellence Awards:
OPN Cloud Program Solution: Global Cloud Transformation Partner of the Year
Specialized Partner of the Year—Global: CX Cloud Partner of the Year
Specialized Partner of the Year: EMEA Industries
Pat Sullivan was talking to Deborah Hayden, senior global marketing manager, Strategic Partner Marketing team, Oracle.
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Putting an Oracle Partnership to the Test
Backed by 52,000 Oracle-skilled professionals, 16,000 infrastructure-experienced individuals and a 25-year track record of delivering large-scale data center transformations, Accenture is a pioneer in designing, building, and running large-scale solutions across the entire Oracle technology stack.
In 2014, Accenture acquired Enkitec, extending its ability to help clients optimize Oracle-based data center solutions. The acquisition brought Enkitec’s substantial expertise and experience to Accenture’s Oracle business. This helped streamline implementations of Oracle engineered systems and database technologies, designed to increase productivity and accelerate time to value for clients.
Kerry Osborne, Managing Director, Accenture
As Accenture is one of only a handful of Oracle Global Cloud Elite and Diamond-level partners around the world, the Accenture Innovation Center for Oracle Engineered Systems is uniquely equipped to carry out large-scale tests using the latest technologies.
Testing Conditions
Behind a glass wall, in a climate-controlled room within the Accenture Innovation Center for Oracle Engineered Systems, you can regularly find a team of Oracle experts working with customers. Here, they demonstrate the capabilities of numerous systems, such as: Oracle SuperCluster, Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, Oracle Database Appliance, Oracle Big Data Appliance, and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance.
From validating quarterly patches and procedures, to costing out large-scale workload or consolidation scenarios, Accenture supports customers in sectors including telco, finance, and manufacturing.
Kerry Osborne, cofounder of Enkitec and now a managing director at Accenture, leads this team. He tells us more about what goes on inside the Innovation Center, located in Dallas, Texas. “Accenture employs some of the world’s best-qualified people in Oracle technology. We’re often asked to examine the performance of all types of applications and workloads, along with the agility and resilience of the infrastructure. We look at how quick it is to provision and deprovision, and even how it enables a private cloud architecture.”
A recent project to help a Nordic-based bank identify the best underlying infrastructure to run enterprise-scale banking software meant carrying out head-to-head comparisons against an IBM platform. The team showed Oracle Engineered Systems to be significantly more capable of handling the volume and scale of transactions.
About 70 percent of the customers who run workloads in our Innovation Center go on to purchase something from the Engineered Systems portfolio.Kerry Osborne
Osborne continues, “We’re hard-core infrastructure techie guys at heart. To us, innovation is about developing the right architecture to accommodate business transformation. It’s also about how workloads extend to the public cloud, and how massive datasets offload from traditional Oracle databases.”
More than just a marriage of convenience
Martin Paynter, Managing Director, Accenture, talks about Accenture’s partnership with Oracle. “We are closely engaged with Oracle’s product development guys, and it’s crucial that we feed back to them on how engineered systems perform in various scenarios at customer sites. If a customer has a problem, as well as traditional support channels, we can leverage our Oracle relationships to find a faster path to success. This gives us a huge advantage over competitors in our space, and it’s great for our customers, too.”
Martin Paynter, Managing Director, Accenture
For the last five years, Accenture has held a three-day conference around Exadata, which has recently expanded to include multiple engineered systems. And because Accenture has such a great relationship with Oracle, they send their top product guys to talk to customers about the internal workings of the stack.
If Oracle ever undersold anything, it’s Exadata. It’s so much more capable than any other platform, it really isn’t a fair fight. Martin Paynter
When asked what the future has in store for the Accenture Innovation Center for Oracle Engineered Systems, Kerry Osborne admits that most clients visiting the center still focus largely on their on-premises infrastructure. While the cloud has arrived, most of the big IT shops they work with are still concerned with optimizing their on-premises systems. But as Oracle Cloud Machine and Exadata Cloud Machine are some of the most interesting things that are coming out of Oracle, he expects them to be the next big players in the Innovation Center.
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
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Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Be in the Know
No matter where you are on your cloud journey, you’ll find valuable content on our BrandVoice page at Forbes.com. You can read articles and blog posts from Oracle specialists and technology journalists, and join the cloud conversation with them and other Forbes contributors.
Regular contributor Chuck Hollis talks about how business leaders employ productive dialog to build essential relations with their IT leadership teams. In one of his recent blog posts, “Five Honest Conversations You Need to Have with Enterprise IT”, Hollis asks the questions businesses need to answer. From what to do about security, service catalogs, and optimizing consumption models, to preparing for mobile, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
In a blog post from last year, Hollis looks ahead and visualizes some IT and other infrastructure predictions for 2016. Revisit his post and see what he got right:
The emergence of joint cloud and data center RFPs
A decline in build-your-own infrastructures
A rise in specialized infrastructure
IT builds its information fortress
Data archive tapes become cool again
There will be turmoil among infrastructure vendors
Have you ever drawn parallels between enterprise IT and the manufacturing industry in the US? Chuck Hollis has, and in another of his posts from 2016—“Why Enterprise IT Will Go the Way of US Manufacturing”—he looks at the importance for both sectors to deliver added value at every opportunity.
Digital innovation is disrupting every industry and every sector. And digital disruptors are driving new business models, products, processes, and capabilities. In his post “How Great Companies Are Made and Will Be Remade Digitally,” Rob Preston explores how the explosion in digital will help to reshape many companies.
Of all the distinct tiers of cloud technology, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is perhaps the least well understood. John Soat’s post—“What’s Really at Stake in Infrastructure as a Service”—compares various Oracle options with those of the other major players in the IaaS space.
Cloud is about making enterprise IT better for all. But for most, the primary goal isn’t about going to a public cloud, it’s about “cloudifying” the existing environment. In another of Chuck Hollis’s blogs—“Mired in a Cloud Debate? Time to Consider ‘Cloudification.’”—he describes one IT leader’s integrated plan for making a reasonably complex IT environment more cloud-like.
Anyone who has experimented with integrating enterprise applications between public and private clouds will tell you it's a whole lot harder than it looks. In his blog post—“The Public-Private Cloud Disconnect: Where Do We Go from Here?”—Hollis looks at the extent of the problem for enterprise IT organizations.
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Making the streets safer
Argentina’s Ministry of Security was created in 2010, and is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the country’s public safety. To improve resource management and data analysis, and to optimize decision-making, the executive team committed to integrating and updating several existing applications into a single, consolidated IT platform.
To make all this possible, the ministry worked with its Oracle partner to develop a private cloud built using Oracle Engineered Systems. By integrating several applications into one platform, the ministry has simplified data management, improved reliability, and enabled the innovation of social incident reporting.
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Proving incredible scalability
The annual number of refugees entering Germany increased last year, from just 30,000 to more than 1.1 million. Dr. Markus Richter, head of infrastructure at German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), was faced with the challenge of scaling the agency’s IT infrastructure to help deal with a huge spike in demand.
In this profile, learn how BAMF utilized Oracle Engineered Systems as an on-premises platform for recording and processing the data of refugees arriving in Germany.
In this video, Dr. Markus Richter talks about how BAMF was also able to scale its operation in just four weeks, and register all incoming refugees, with the help of Oracle’s platform as a service.
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Enterprise Cloud Predictions
Cloud computing is constantly evolving. And as a result, businesses are transforming at an irrepressible rate. Every organization’s journey to the cloud is unique, and the effect it will have on your business processes will depend on where your journey begins.
Here are a few predictions for how cloud computing will impact the enterprise in 2017 and beyond.
1Cloud-based mission-critical workloads will take off.
Cloud has long promised the migration of all enterprise production workloads. But that migration has yet to happen.
The chief barrier to cloud migration remains a lack of commitment and recourse to support production service-level agreements. On one hand, cloud providers are limiting their accountability, as they lack the talent to support custom portfolios. On the other, they’re failing to provide sufficient control into the public data center to self-manage service-level agreements.
The IaaS provider best equipped to take more responsibility and deliver the control tenants demand will be the one to drive cloud migration in 2017.
Article: Information Week: ClubCorp CIO Sees Cloud as Hole in One for Golf
2Corporate-owned data center numbers will plummet.
Just a few years ago, this statement would have seemed outrageous. But now, it seems all but inevitable.
As organizations focus their IT spending on cloud computing, they’ll begin to migrate their workloads from corporate-owned data centers to purpose-built facilities, managed and run by enterprise cloud providers. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd predicts that we’ll see corporate-owned data center numbers fall 80 percent by 2025, and that the same percentage of IT spending will be devoted to cloud services.
While corporate data center numbers may not fall straight away, we do expect an immediate reduction in direct investment for compute capacity, storage, and networking services.
Blog: Oracle CEO Mark Hurd Predicts the Future of IT: Round 2
3Enterprise cloud becomes the most secure place for IT processing.
This year’s threat landscape will be highly changeable. External threats—coupled with the need for better governance and privacy mandates—will make security a key priority for all lines of business.
In years past, security was a major barrier to cloud investment. Data sovereignty, data privacy, and control issues deterred many organizations from pursuing cloud adoption. But in the future, those very same concerns will be the things that draw new organizations to the cloud.
Established cloud vendors with solid security track records have the expertise and resources to deploy layers of defense that many companies simply cannot duplicate in-house.
Survey: Security Inside Out
4Digital transformation becomes the norm.
Our world is becoming increasingly digitally connected, and it’s transforming the way we live, work, and play.
These same technological advancements provide unprecedented opportunities for businesses to expand, innovate, and create new value. Sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, and even urban planning have been reimagined and redefined by the cloud.
To realize these opportunities, today’s enterprises must not only develop new cloud-ready tools, but also put digital at the center of their businesses. Hidden within today’s digital connections are the solutions to our most urgent business challenges.
This year, we’ll see more companies successfully embrace new integrated cloud technologies.
Report: Steering into the Innovation Fast Lane
Video: Be Business Digital5The cloud empowers small business innovation.
Cloud has become a catalyst for small business growth, allowing small businesses to innovate freely, carve out new markets, and disrupt the status quo.
The digital economy demands that companies of all sizes compete based on technology-enabled value. While some seek to evolve existing business practices, others are striving to launch new services that exploit extensive, low-cost computational power. Traditionally, access to such high-performance resources has been too expensive for smaller businesses. But what once cost 100 million USD up front is now available for 10 USD per hour.
The cloud is allowing small businesses to innovate, experiment, and sustain ongoing profitability.
Blog: How Infrastructure as a Service Can Help You in Your ‘Shark Tank’ Moment’
670 percent of IT organizations move systems management to the cloud.
More than 90 percent of companies have multiple systems management tools, but just 6 percent trust their incomplete data. Consequently, IT operations professionals struggle to create effective management approaches.
The pace of business is increasing. As more organizations adopt DevOps practices and focus on digital experience, they’ll need to eliminate management data silos and embrace machine learning just to keep up.
Some have already embraced systems management in the cloud, unifying management data across multiple clouds and on premises. Others are benefiting from data science applied to the operational management problem. Only Oracle Management Cloud provides an intelligent, unified, cloud-based approach that applies machine learning to the complete operational dataset.
And while many cloud tools are built exclusively for cloud systems, ours does both.
We expect that by 2020, 70 percent will have moved their most critical systems management use cases to the cloud.
Make your infrastructure cloud-ready.
