By Cat Yong
This article continues from part 1 that covered the types of integrated IT stack solutions out there, global market share of the major players and Oracle trying to carve a space for itself in the data centre segment with extreme data centre solutions.
Back to that vendor lock in question
Is it a case of vendor lock-in or customer opt-in?Are customers opting to be locked-in?
Oracle APAC execs insist that customers still have a choice. And they feel that lower total cost of ownership – less maintenance, less electricity, less floor space in the data centre, less complexity – and better reliability, makes Engineered Systems the more compelling option.
IDC’s Group VP of Asia/Pacific Practice Group, Sandra Ng opined, “Very few CIOs would want to go with one single vendor. But a lot of times, because of the environment that they are in, because of the applications and legacy systems that they have, they don’t have a choice, but to rely on one major player.
“They feel that a major supplier or partner, would actually create simplicity,” she said, and this is reflected by the worldwide 50% increase in sales of integrated solutions.
IDC’s Oostveen opined, it is still early days, as though expecting the space to increase exponentially in the near future.
Storage vendors leading the charge?
With storage vendors like Netapp and EMC leading the charge in the horizontal integration space, Senior Storage Sales Director, Amit Malhotra had chipped in that with demand for storage capacity increasing 40% every year, Oracle’s extreme compression technology of at least 10 times, decreases investment into storage capacity overall.
He said, “For example, 40% percent of 100 TB or 40% of a compressed and optimised 10TB? You do the math.”
Another plus point for vertical integrated solutions is the time it takes to stand up a service provisioning system.
CTO of Oracle Systems APAC, Stuart Long pointed out, “The customer may take 6 to 9 months procuring all the different layers, putting them all together, and you can change any piece of that, just to be able to provide an application.
“Or you can come to a vendor like Oracle with optimised solutions we can put on your floor, that can be up and running in a matter of weeks!”
The question about vendor lock in, is starting to lose relevancy, when the current trend for organisations; especially those that are entrenched in legacy infrastructure; is to simplify, simplify, simplify.
There is a lot of conversation around Oracle cloud-based services as well, and why this further renders whatever that is underlying it ie. integrated stacks, as irrelevant. One Oracle exec response to vendor lock-in has been that when people are subscribing to a service, they don’t want to know what it’s running on.
Somehow, I don’t buy that.
I don’t believe that CIOs or IT departments would suddenly not want to know about the hardware that IT services are being delivered from. Business users, maybe. But not IT departments.
In any case, the battle for data centre supremacy is going to heat up well into next year and beyond, and there are initiatives spearheaded by a major storage vendor, for example the software-defined data centre which seem to be at odds with Oracle’s efficiency-based extreme data centre. Are open standards APIs enough?
This takes some wrapping of the head aroound, and my burning question would be if these two different approaches would create siloes on premise or in the cloud.
It would be good to see how these both play out, over the next year. Or whether users and customers see enough of a difference between the two in terms of performance, speed to market, convenience and reliability, in the first place.
Enterprise IT News was a guest of Oracle’s to Oracle Open World 2013 in San Francisco from Sept 22nd – Sept 26th
