Oracle Engineered Systems Engineered For Innovation

ORACLE ENGINEERED SYSTEMS ENGINEERED FOR INNOVATION

Transforming and Simplifying IT for Business Innovation 3 Increasing the Speed and Success of Innovation 8 Cutting Complexity and Costs 10 The Call for a New Breed of IT Infrastructure 15 The Changing Role of IT 17 The Impact on Innovation 19 The Oracle Difference 24 2

TRANSFORMING AND SIMPLIFYING IT FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION

TRANSFORMING AND SIMPLIFYING IT FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION Recently, major trends and transformations in IT have forced organizations to change the way they operate. Cloud, mobility, and big data have changed the rules and reshaped the way that companies develop strategies, make decisions, and execute day-to-day tasks. Taking control of these trends and embracing them is essential for businesses looking to increase efficiency, boost flexibility, lower costs, and keep up with agile new competitors. Oracle engineers IT systems with innovation in mind. With easy-tomanage, highly available systems, Oracle customers have the platforms necessary to innovate with confidence, freeing up critical resources that were historically reserved for day-to-day maintenance and upkeep. 4

TRANSFORMING AND SIMPLIFYING IT FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION Technology has become one of the biggest drivers of competitive advantage. IT departments are now facing enormous pressure to transform their operations and provide solutions and infrastructure that support innovation across the entire business. Today, choosing and investing in the right IT systems has become one of the most important strategic decisions that a business has to make. And if this wasn’t enough of a challenge, IT organizations also have to find a way to achieve all of this while simplifying IT. If an organization fails to control the complexity of its IT environment, it can start impacting internal processes and efficiency. When hardware is co-engineered and preintegrated with software, everything becomes simpler—freeing up essential resources to improve existing services and make the most of new opportunities. 5

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Boston Medical Center Boston Medical Center faced challenges just like these. With multiple vendors and solutions contributing to an already complex database environment, it needed to find a simple way to consolidate IT and focus on improving patient care and the analysis of treatment efficacy. The medical center needed a complete solution that could streamline its operations straight out of the box, and chose Oracle Database Appliance to transform the way it manages its entire data warehouse. 6

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Boston Medical Center The Oracle Database Appliance engineered system made the difference at Boston Medical Center by providing a costand resource-effective packaged system that: Lowered the total cost Consolidated its data of ownership (TCO) and management team to a improved the performance single Oracle Database of its legacy environment Appliance administrator, Delivered significant annual cost reductions in storage and engineering resources Improved CPU and RAM allowing server and storage engineers to focus on other highpriority projects usage, accelerating runtime reporting performance by up to 50 percent 7

INCREASING THE SPEED AND SUCCESS OF INNOVATION Many organizations find that trying to expand, change, or innovate using existing IT infrastructures can slow them down and impact ROI. There will always be a rate of failure when trying to innovate, but being able to get to market or implement new ideas and processes faster significantly increases the chances of success. ROI Innovation today requires a data-driven approach. Stakeholders and decision-makers need immediate access to detailed information and analytics to make the fastest, most well-informed decisions possible. By empowering everybody with an IT infrastructure that supports the timely delivery of data insights and enables the detailed modeling of innovative projects, businesses can increase success rates, get to market faster, and identify more new opportunities for growth. 8

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Atos IT Solutions and Services Like many organizations, Atos IT Solutions and Services first considered engineered systems to help decrease IT costs and bring exciting new services to customers faster. As an IT outsourcing company, Atos didn’t just need performance and agility; it also needed extreme capacity and support for multitenancy on a single machine. Atos deployed Oracle SuperCluster, a unified and highperformance engineered system that “We chose Oracle SuperCluster because, unlike integrates virtualization, computing, alternatives from other vendors, it enabled us to storage, networking, and systems operate a multitenancy environment to host more management. This enabled Atos to than one customer on one machine, which is optimize service levels while supporting critical for our IT outsourcing business. In addition, multiple customer environments. everything from Oracle is tested up front, easy to use, and easy to upgrade, from firmware versions, to middleware and system management.” Eduard Kowarsch, COO, “Managed Services, Central Eastern Europe, Atos IT Solutions and Services” 9

CUTTING COMPLEXITY AND COSTS As organizations grow, so does the complexity of their IT environments. With data volumes increasing exponentially, many businesses are realizing that the time has come to take two key actions: increase capacity and scalability, and simplify IT. The impact of increasing IT complexity stretches far beyond manageability. Systems are the backbone of an organization, and if they become slow, inefficient, and inconvenient to use, so do the services offered by the business. This can have a dramatic impact across the enterprise, including: A loss of business agility and a significant increase in time to market Reduced customer satisfaction and poor customer experiences as a result of inefficient and slow processes Lower employee productivity as they cannot access the IT resources and data they need, when they need it most Missing opportunities by not supporting new initiatives such as mobility and BYOD Stagnation, as you cannot innovate with the platforms and technology available Hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on continued investment and labor costs associated with managing the inefficient infrastructure 10

CUTTING COMPLEXITY AND COSTS According to Accenture, downtime in data centers costs 41 percent more than it did just four years ago, illustrating a growing need for reliable systems that business leaders cannot afford to ignore. “Accenture Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disruptor PDF” It is important to recognize that every dollar spent maintaining an inefficient “Aggressive use of highly converged infrastructure deployments can reduce application infrastructure costs by about 50 percent.” David Floyer, Wikibon article, “Duplicating Public Clouds for Oracle DBAs.” IT environment is a dollar that could have been invested in a simpler, more cost-effective system that would enable you to drive innovation. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to capitalize on this huge opportunity, sacrificing increasingly scarce resources for perceived short-term convenience. When you simplify IT, you cut costs. Investing in a smarter, more efficient infrastructure is the first step towards lower-cost, higher-value IT —and the buy-in price is lower than you might expect. Once organizations recognize just how much maintenance and management tasks are currently costing their IT department, they will begin to understand exactly how integrated systems can cut TCO so significantly. 11

CUTTING COMPLEXITY AND COSTS With systems that have been preintegrated and engineered Common business challenges to deliver the highest performance at the lowest price, organizations can take a huge amount of the time, effort, and cost out of ensuring all components and software can work together seamlessly. This doesn’t just ensure that new Growing IT complexity systems deliver predictable results straight out of the box; it also frees up critical resources for use on projects that drive the business forward and add value. Increasing pressure to drive innovation Backed up by the speed and agility offered by integrated systems, organizations can adopt a true culture of immediacy and flexibility—one that strives to tackle issues faster, accelerate growth, and do more. This kind of shift in attitudes and behavior across the enterprise is truly Shrinking budgets achievable with the right mixture of efficient and cost-effective IT. Oracle engineers its hardware and software across the entire Oracle technology stack, so you don’t have to. The result is extreme performance combined with low pricing that helps customers cut IT complexity and focus more on business innovation. Social, mobile, and big data putting strain on current IT infrastructures Indecision about whether to build or buy systems 12

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Universiteit Twente Ranked among the world’s top 200 research universities, Universiteit Twente needed to replace an aging IT infrastructure in order to deliver efficient processes, provide convenient access to student services, and eliminate unplanned downtime. The university deployed five Oracle Database Appliance units to prevent service interruptions that affected critical business functions. The university hasn’t experienced any downtime for more than a year, allowing the IT department to spend time on supporting innovative projects. 13

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Universiteit Twente Oracle made the difference at Universiteit Twente by tripling database transaction processing, improving the stability of more than 50 databases, and: Replacing 15 database servers to Optimizing the performance of eliminate interruptions to critical Oracle Database Appliance through administrative functions continuous advice, on file-system Running without downtime for caching, and disk administration more than a year 14

THE CALL FOR A NEW BREED OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE

THE CALL FOR A NEW BREED OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE An organization’s IT systems are the foundation of its operations. They function like an essential part of the team, and when selecting them, businesses need to look for qualities similar to those that they’d look for in new employees. The systems: i Must have all-purpose, core data-center knowledge, as well as workload-optimized expertise Must work together seamlessly, with as little friction as possible Should bring new capabilities with them that aid innovation Need to be hardworking and bring a high level of performance Must deliver an economically sensible way to run the data-center Because of this, organizations are turning to a new breed of IT infrastructure—converged or integrated systems. 16

THE CHANGING ROLE OF IT For IT professionals, this new breed of infrastructure means a new way of working. Across the board, integrated systems are making IT organizations Oracle doesn’t just provide integrated systems; it provides engineered systems. more efficient. Time-consuming routine tasks such as provisioning, patching, Components aren’t just configuration management, monitoring, selected to work together; and troubleshooting are reduced they are coengineered significantly thanks to simple automation to get the most from and integrated management tools. one another right from the beginning of their development. The result is This means that dedicated IT teams can finally start spending time on simplified IT systems that the tasks they really want to do. They can make the most of their expertise deliver extreme levels of and start driving the business forward instead of just fighting fires in the performance, scalability, data center. From a management perspective, this opens up even more and availability—and opportunities to cut costs by more efficiently allocating the staff and skills streamline management that are available. and operations. 17