IN two separate, virtual engagements, the first one, an interview with Vinay Kumar, Senior Vice President, North America Cloud Engineering for Oracle, and the second one, a media briefing with Cherian Varghese, Regional Managing Director of ASEAN & SAGE for Oracle, Malaya Business Insight discovers how the world’s most prolific database and ERP solutions provider helped companies survive the pandemic, its Autonomous Databases keeping businesses humming despite the quarantine.
In the first interview, Vinay Kumar revealed how the virtual meeting platform Zoom benefited from locating in the Oracle Cloud, taking advantage of its data warehouses to manage a 300 times increase in the number of users since the lockdown started. Currently, Oracle has processed over 5 to 10 petabytes of video and audio data a day for Zoom.
One petabyte is 1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
“Without a system as resilient as Oracle’s Cloud database it would not have been possible for users to have Zoom meetings running practically the whole day. The new normal created the situation, but we were ready for it,” Kumar expressed.
He also said that the pandemic is a time when people realized the true value of the Cloud, especially because it was meant to be elastic and highly available. According to Kumar, during the pandemic, most enterprises and even small businesses had to reinvent themselves and the Cloud is the best way to get started.
“Oracle is part of the equation or the data strategy. We work with customers who modernize their applications or add new applications to meet their business transformation needs. The pandemic did increase in demand for Cloud across our customer bases. It stressed our system and tested its resilience but it has proven its capabilities,” Kumar added.
In the second engagement one day later, a virtual press conference with Cherian Varghese, Regional managing director of Oracle ASEAN/SAGE, information on the launch of Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer was revealed.
Varghese said that in the middle of the pandemic businesses have had to evaluate their operations and make tough decisions. “Across the board, organizations that have been quick to innovate and pivot based on market demands and landscape at present time are finding themselves in a better place,” he said.
Developed because of strong customer demand for data management and warehousing that is located either on-premise or in-country, the industry’s first fully-managed Cloud region that is built practically in the backyard of an office space or inside a government hall, brings all of Oracle’s second-generation Cloud services, including Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud applications to a singular, customer-located datacenter.
Varghese explained how, at $500K a month or $ 6 million a year, the Dedicated Region Cloud provides enterprises who subscribe to the service will get the exact same complete set of modern cloud services, APIs, industry-leading SLAs, superior price-performance, and highest levels of security available from Oracle’s public cloud regions in their own datacenters.
“We take care of everything, all that the customer needs to provide is a space wherein we are able to set up the customer Cloud…Unlike other systems which as “boxes” of technologies put together, ours is all made by Oracle, thus compatibility and performance level is very high,” Varghese said.
The Cloud@Customer is an ideal setup for highly regulated or security-focused businesses needing to meet demanding latency and data residency requirements, reduce operational costs, and modernize legacy applications. Current customers include Nomura Research Institute (NRI) in Japan and Oman Information Technology and Communications Group.
During his discussion, Varghese also said that as economies reopen, businesses need to balance urgent and critical short-term needs with long-term strategic priorities. In the Philippines, this would mean investing in efforts to ensure their survival during a period of uncertainty, the Oracle executive said.
He also spoke of retail giant Seven-Eleven Corporation (7-11) in the Philippines. The company is a customer whose operations run on Oracle Customer Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle’s other customers in the Philippines include Vitarich and EEI Corporation.
Construction giant EEI is one of many companies in the ASEAN on the Oracle SaaS platform alongside trusted marine service provider Swire Pacific Offshore, and Indonesia’s largest e-commerce company, Bukalapak, and Vietnam’s largest private commercial bank, Asia Commercial Bank.
