Financial Times

Oracle’s ability to cut IT costs for its customers
By Lanelle Hills reporting from Mumbai
Oracle Corporation, the world’s largest enterprise software company, at its recently concluded premier global technology and business conference in Mumbai, last week revealed the potential of its latest computing technology to take the cost out of IT and make it more accessible to businesses.

“In grid computing you’re able to take the cost out of IT. You’re able to have flexibility to meet the ever changing needs of the market,” said Roger Scott, Vice President, Technology Sales Consulting, Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific speaking at Oracle Open World, one of two conferences to be held in the Asian Pacific region.

Grid computing which the corporation believes could create significant changes as those created by the Internet, is the core of Oracle’s information Architecture. It involves the harnessing of many smaller computers which work together as one larger one in other terms it is the pooling of IT resources into a single set of shared services for all computing needs.

The benefits of which include the ability for companies to quickly and easily create large scale computing infrastructure from inexpensive off the shelf components, businesses can move from existing infrastructure to grid computing at their own pace and at each stage along the way higher levels of efficiency, lower operating costs and rapid return on investment are achieved and such conditions in this impact of Grid computing, Scott says is highly beneficial to SMEs.

“SMEs really stand to benefit potentially from Grid Computing. They don’t necessarily have the legacy and infrastructure environment to cope with. So when they start to invest in a grid computing model it will make them far more competitive and allow them to compete on a global scale and even with the larger enterprises in the world today,” said Scott while adding that Sri Lanka too had that same opportunity to be competitive since many organizations have taken some time to get onto the technology bandwagon they are not burdened with, since there is a need to fine tune old systems to be compatible with this latest emerging wave where their can continue to run with there existing hardware components.

He further stressed that one of the major benefits of grid computing was its ability put in place infrastructure that grows, saying “in the past smaller organizations had to compete for technology but with grid computing you can start with low cost hardware commodity components, so you can build the infrastructure at a fraction of the cost and without investing in new infrastructure and just keep adding as you progress, this also levels the playing field in enterprises and markets.”

According to a study released here, called the Oracle Grid Index Report conducted twice yearly for the corporation which traces the adoption of grid computing among countries by Quocirca between June and September 2005, Asia Pacific leads the world in readiness but does not capitalize on this by adopting grid computing. The grid index was derived from 1,400 interviews with senior IT influencers across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific and based on three criteria Foundation readiness, Knowledge and awareness and adoption life cycles.

However, the report also revealed that India was in the forefront of the Asian Pacific region in grid computing. The reason was that actual interest and knowledge of grid computing was being converted into adoption.

The Oracle corporation first set up operations in Sri Lanka in 1991 through its local partners and in 2004 opened its Liason office. Currently it operates through its network of three partners and over 75 organisations in Sri Lanka use Oracle applications across government, financial telecommunications and manufacturing services.

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