Upbeat over Exalogic’s global uptake, Andrew Lau, Senior Director, Oracle Exalogic – Asia Pacific, discussed the organization’s strategy to leverage the acquired hardware expertise and extend the Exa family. By Heena Jhingan
It has been over an year since you launched Exalogic. How has it fared globally and in India?
When it comes to our engineered system products, we first launched Exadata, a product for the database, which was very successful. Subsequently, we launched Exalogic the focus of which is around the application layer. We started promising scalability and consolidation around this product and it has been around for over an year now. Since the last two quarters of FY12, Exalogic has been our fastest growing product.
We have a presence with Exalogic in every major region including ANZ, Greater China, ASEAN, Korea and India. With regard to engineered systems, we now have expertise in both software and hardware. If you look at Exalogic, there is a tangible physical aspect. However, beneath the physical structure lies the Elastic Cloud Software that drives how an engineered system works optimally by building capabilities around Java and Oracle applications.
By 2015, we anticipate that over 30% of the market shipments in terms of physical hardware would consist of engineered systems. Exalogic is present in over 20 industries globally and in about ten in the APAC. Our customers include telcos, companies playing in the financial market, manufacturers and the public sector. Then there are a few orders from education and tourism. In India, the momentum is strong and convergent on some dimensions; the industry is moving towards building infrastructure and a rich ecosystem of ISVs where we see an opportunity to work with them.
What’s the business case for Exalogic in tourism?
The tourism industry is using this solution for hosting applications that deliver content in response to online inquiries. It is about OLTP and delivering high quality digital content. The combination of Exalogic at the front end with other components of the Exa family helps us deliver a unique experience to customers querying travel sites.
Our Exa solutions have had a major impact on the manufacturing industry as well. In many countries, we have examples where every transaction in a retail bank is on Exa. If Exa fails, the bank will be unable to do business. This is the kind of impact that the Exa family is making on users’ lives. This is why we are looking at high value, high volume and scalable markets such as India.
How do you plan to extend the Exa family?
We started with Exadata, focusing on the database tier. Then we extended it to Exalogic, which is now for the application layer. Early last year, we launched Exalytics, which is the next generation of high speed analytics products. We are working to bring the Exa family to the different types of layers that exist within the IT fabric. The latest launch of Elastic Cloud software helps us go deeper into the Cloud space by offering manageability of cloud and software delivery through Exalogic.
Indian CIOs remain skeptical about Cloud computing in general. How does your offering address their concerns?
The Cloud is something that every CIO is thinking about. The concerns around handling the Cloud and making it economical, efficient and reliable are not unique to Indian CIOs. Exalogic plays a critical role in resolving these problem areas. Our newest Cloud product, Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2, touches on these issues by bring agility and scalability to the table. I believe, Exalogic is the ideal platform for applications of all types, from small-scale departmental applications such as HR, finance or sales automation to the largest and most demanding ERP and mainframe applications. While Exalogic is optimized for enterprise Java, Fusion Middleware and Fusion Applications, it is also an outstanding environment for thousands of third-party and custom Linux and Solaris applications. We are also trying to market security, which is an inherent feature of Exalogic.
