If you are an Oracle systems ISV, you might be feeling a bit perplexed over this seemingly unavoidable windstorm – the Oracle Public Cloud is imminent, how does the Oracle SPARC Cloud fit into it, and why should an ISV even care? The folk tale Henny Penny comes to mind where Chicken Little claims, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” in the mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.

Just recapping a few comments made by CEO Mark Hurd at last month’s Oracle OpenWorld is enough to get that mindset started. In fact, all Oracle keynote presentations carried a common theme about the conversion to the cloud being one of the most significant IT transformations in history.

Mark Hurd, in outlining “CEO Priorities,” made sure his audience was clear on the fact that “Oracle’s growth rate in cloud is higher than other cloud vendors‘.”

He further stated his case, predicting that by 2025, “80 percent of IT budgets will be spent on cloud, not traditional IT systems,” and, “The number of corporate-owned data centers will drop by 80 percent … as workloads move to the cloud.”

Well, before the sky does fall (for, in this case, the cloud is coming), let’s review three questions ISVs should be asking about this dramatic change in their business model of selling software to the masses.

Question #1 – What’s in it for ME?

In a word, OPPORTUNITY, which Webster would define as, “an amount of time or a situation in which something can be done.“

If you are an organization making and selling software to run on Oracle systems (x86 or SPARC) with Oracle Solaris 11 (public list here), you should care very much about the market opportunity this represents.  Today there are hundreds of thousands of SPARC servers around the world running mission-critical enterprise workloads. There is no need to re-platform if you can run these mission-critical apps on the exact same gear in Oracle’s public cloud. Whether that is for dev/test, production or a disaster recovery site, the simplicity and cost savings of moving those workloads to dedicated SPARC compute in the Oracle Public Cloud just got real easy. 

Oracle SVP Dan Miller estimated in his Oracle OpenWorld keynote that approximately 5 percent of enterprise workloads are on the cloud.  Going from 5 percent to 80 percent is another way for ISVs to spell OPPORTUNITY.

Question #2 – What is Oracle’s SPARC Model 300, and why does it matter to an ISV?

Oracle’s SPARC Cloud is available today as a dedicated compute infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering called the SPARC Model 300 (video: SPARC in the Oracle Public Cloud). This offering provides significant advantages to our ISVs over competitive IaaS offerings. Here are four things to consider:

1. Security –- Security for the cloud needs to be fast and reliable. The Model 300 can deliver public cloud users the security they need with virtually no performance impact. Check out these blogs on how the latest SPARC processor, the SPARC S7, compares to the latest x86 processors:
– SHA Digest Encryption: SPARC S7 Performance, Beats Intel E5-2699 v4 Per Core Under Load

– AES Encryption: SPARC S7 Performance, Beats Intel E5-2699 v4 Per Core Under Load

– Real-Time Enterprise: SPARC S7-2 Advantage Per Core Under Load Compared to 2-Chip x86 E5-2699 v3
– SPECjEnterprise2010: SPARC S7-2 Secure and Unsecure Results

2. Java — Java fuels many of the applications that power cloud computing. This includes mission-critical enterprise apps where SPARC has been a mainstay. Oracle’s SPARC Solaris systems are tuned to deploy Java (JVM) applications in the cloud. So, it should be no surprise to hear that our internal tests indicate that both the SPARC M7 and the S7 are highly efficient running Java workloads. 

Questions?  See this blog: SPARC S7 & Java – Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!

3. Analytics — The SPARC Model 300 has revolutionized the approach to big data analytic workloads with its hardware-based data analytics accelerators (DAX) co-processors, delivering 3x to 12x faster time to insight. See this 5-minute video to better understand how Oracle SPARC DAX changes the game in analytics. Need an example? Apache Spark is an extremely popular open source software analytic workload, which clearly demonstrates the value of including DAX co-processors into the equation (see Apache Spark and DAX), resulting in a 6x performance improvement.

4. Deep innovation –- Oracle leverages hardware and software engineering innovation to deliver a radically better cloud-based solution. By innovating the complete software stack with the compute infrastructure, Oracle is uniquely positioned as a company to deliver a public cloud for all workloads, not just for the Oracle software stack. Oracle is aiming to provide a cloud solution with the lowest total operating cost, with mission-critical reliability, with the fastest performance, built on open standards, providing compatibility to move between cloud and on-premises, and with built-in, always-on security.

Question #3 – What should an ISV do to position for success in the Oracle SPARC Cloud?

Here are three immediate actions for ISVs to get started:

1. Register and publish your Oracle Cloud-compatible applications on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. There are 1,400 partners today with 3,000 applications posted there. By doing that, you immediately gain visibility among Oracle’s 400,000 customers. 

2. Get your developers on board now so they can develop better software and faster. First, they can gain immediate access to the latest SPARC technology on Oracle’s Software in Silicon Cloud – swisdev.oracle.com. This secure cloud platform can provide our partners with free access to ready-to-run virtual environments, and the Software in Silicon features of Oracle SPARC M7 and S7 systems. Second, they should visit Oracle’s Developer Cloud Services  to gain some hands-on experience in a fully provisioned environment to code, test, deploy and manage applications in the Oracle Cloud. 

3. Contact our Cloud Applications Engineering team for a free discussion of your needs for the Oracle SPARC Cloud. Simply send an email to: [email protected] and we will get back to you within 48 hours to schedule a time. We have a global team of cloud engineers who would love to hear about your challenges with moving to the cloud. We can discuss licensing, metering, networking, security, quality of service, data access, configurations, migration, and more.

All the best,

Mike Mulkey

Mike Mulkey is a Principal Product Manager with Oracle’s Cloud Applications Engineering team and is a frequent contributor to the Openomics blog on Oracle.com.

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