Now that Oracle has Sun in its fold, the company predicts that there are bright days ahead for engineered systems – integrated bundles that combine the best of hardware and software for what the company claims “unmatched” price performance in the industry.

Stuart Long, Technology Officer & Senior Director - Systems Sales Consulting, Oracle Systems Asia Pacific & Japan, was in India recently to meet potential and existing customers. Excerpts from an interview with Sanjay Gupta:

There's a lot of talk in the industry about bringing simplicity to how IT is installed, managed and run. What is Oracle's point of view on that?
If you talk to a research firm such as IDC they would tell you that as much as 70 to 80 per cent of the money is spent on basic plugging and running existing systems. What we believe we can do is reduce that significantly by integrating systems in a better way. Oracle believes in taking the best-of-breed and putting it together in an integrated offering because, ultimately, all IT systems should work together.

What we try and do is eliminate the complexity that comes with integrating, maintaining and upgrading components that were never designed to work together by engineering hardware and software together. Oracle's engineered systems have all the hardware, software and applications that most organizations need to run their business.

Other vendors also have integrated systems and bundled offers. How is Oracle different?
Since we own a lot of components in the entire hardware-software stack, we can offer better integration across various layers of the stack. This includes testing for patches, troubleshooting, tackling performance issues at OS or database levels and other such benefits.

How is Oracle helping IT leaders deal with their key operational challenges?
One of the things Oracle helps IT leaders do is reduce their operating expenditure. In our interaction with them, we have found that a lot of IT executives have more equipment than they use. That's where our solutions such as the Exalogic Elastic Cloud come into the picture. It's a fully integrated solution with computing, storage and networking capabilities and has scalable, open-standard grid architecture

You also have something called the Exadata Database Machine? Can you talk more about it and what makes this product attractive to technology buyers?
It's a complete package of of servers, storage, networking, and software that is highly scalable, secure and redundant. Exadata has emerged as one of the fastest selling Oracle products with more than 1000 machines installed in 67 countries and across 23 industries.

Both the Exadata Database Machine and the Exalogic Elastic Cloud come assembled and debugged; what's more all components are tuned and they are ready to run from day one. Deployment is a whole lot faster and easier and significantly less risky.

We believe that customers will find Exadata a good platform on which to consolidate their private cloud initiatives.

On the SPARC platform, you recently announced the SuperCluster based on T4 chips. What's the big deal about that?
Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is based on our new SPARC T4 servers. It is the world’s fastest general-purpose engineered system which delivers the biggest generational performance increase in the history of SPARC processors. It combines Oracle’s SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Solaris with the optimized database performance of Oracle Exadata storage cells and the accelerated middleware and application processing of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

So, how will these engineered systems change the way IT functions?
We believe that engineered systems will bring an inflection point in the industry – an opportunity to move past the typical incremental improvements, and fundamentally change the IT operating model.