Executive Roundtable: Oracle Modernization is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
By Lane F. Cooper, Editorial Director, BizTechReports and Contributing Editor, CIO.com
As competitive pressures and customer expectations rise in the uncertain economic outlook, boards and senior executives are revisiting technology modernization and business transformation strategies. All major IT investments – including those in enterprise applications – are being analyzed to ensure high-performance levels as increasingly complicated heterogeneous infrastructures are embraced. When it comes to modernizing Oracle application management strategies in today's hybrid, multi-cloud environment, the principles that should guide the decision-making process include:
Francois Martin and Doug Bloom of IBM
* Establishing a contextual framework that fully rationalizes the cost implications of Oracle operations across on-prem and cloud-based platforms;
* Maximizing enterprise flexibility-through-portability to ensure the agile movement of Oracle workloads across enterprise-owned infrastructures and IaaS, PaaS and SaaS environments; and
* Optimizing the integration of the heterogeneous enterprise compute environment to provide complete visibility and cross-platform management of mission-critical Oracle applications.
In addition, the most successful organizations will take a long view when modernizing their Oracle environments and pursue a systematic approach to these initiatives.
These were among the areas of consensus that emerged from an executive roundtable on Oracle modernization strategies held by CIO.com and co-hosted by Doug Bloom and Francois Martin of IBM. Over a dozen enterprise technology leaders representing various industry sectors -- including financial services, high tech, hospitality, professional services and logistics -- participated in the session.
According to analysts at Gartner, enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake traditional "on-prem" spending on infrastructure software, business process services, system infrastructure and application software -- including Oracle databases -- by 2025. While the projected spend will focus on the public cloud, a significant percentage of workloads will operate in private clouds and on-prem environments for a variety of technical, operational and financial reasons.
A significant segment of the discussion focused on the performance, risk management and license management issues that must be addressed as on-prem environments are consolidated and other Oracle elements move to the cloud. On this point, we discussed the intrinsically monolithic -- and often highly customized -- nature of existing Oracle operations.
Containerizing Oracle for Hybrid Cloud Portability
"For large organizations that have been around for significant periods, enterprise leaders are identifying ways to strip off Oracle application functionality that can be moved to cloud environments by using containerization technologies," said IBM's Bloom.
This, however, requires significant thought on how these cloud segments can be integrated into core functions that will likely have to remain on-prem. It is for this reason that organizations will take the long view. They will move Oracle workloads to new environments when it makes sense and keep them on-prem for the same reasons.
“For instance,” pointed out IBM’s Martin, “organizations should ensure that a strategy is in place to provide long-term access to Oracle data as workloads shift from one environment to another. This is important for compliance reasons, to mine data for insights and to support other important corporate operations. That data may be a good candidate to move to the cloud for easy access and long-term stability (which is good governance). It is also a potential entry point for building an effective hybrid-cloud architecture.”
Supporting enterprise-wide Oracle implementations in this hybrid environment will require IT staff to approach application architecture and governance differently. New governance structures will be critical in supporting Oracle modernization initiatives in today's hyper-dynamic and competitive environment. It will require organizations to make a cultural shift -- from a "let's customize Oracle" mindset to a philosophy that revolves around the "configuration" of standardized elements that can move between on-prem and cloud resources.
"Standardization through containers and application program interfaces (APIs) is emerging as the key to achieving flexibility. In turn, flexibility is how most enterprises will enable the personalization that used to be achieved through customization," explained IBM's Bloom. "This should be one of the core principles behind the architecture that supports enterprise computing in general, and Oracle applications distributed across on-prem and cloud environments in particular."
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