By Siobhan Kennedy
Corporations have to adopt the same internet model as dotcom companies like Amazon.com and eBay if they’re going to succeed in the next wave of computing. So said Oracle’s chairman and CEO Larry Ellison during his keynote presentation at Internet World in New York yesterday.
Ellison, whose own company is going through a massive consolidation of its servers down to two by the end of the year, told the audience that the days of running businesses by distributing complexity on lots of little servers were over. Amazon doesn’t do its business in Germany using a server in Germany and in France using a server in Paris, he said, they operate out of a single datacenter in Seattle, Washington.
Ellison, who spent the majority of his keynote speech rehashing the same the internet changes everything speech he’s given for the last year, told the audience it was imperative that they get shared applications off the desktop and onto shared servers. By putting data together you can get more information. It should be a fundamental goal of your company, he said, you can’t do it overnight, but you must do it. He added: You’ll save a fortune but the really important reason is that you’ll get a lot more valuable information.
He cited the example of his own company, which currently has an HR system for each region it operates in. I’m the CEO, I’m the one who’s paid to have all the knowledge but could I answer a simple question about how many employees Oracle has? To do that, Ellison said he would have to dial in to every server around the world, pull down all the employee numbers, enter them into a spreadsheet and then eventually he may or may not get an accurate answer. I’m paying top dollar to not know what’s going on, he said, not knowing information doesn’t come cheap.
The answer to that problem, he said, is graphically demonstrated by the dotcom companies, who keep all their data in a single datacenter and who can pull off relevant information about their customers – their buying habits, their last purchase and so on – with the flick of a switch. The internet model of computing is all about that, he said, every other network in the world has centralized complexity and gives its customers an easy access appliance to get at the information. There’s no reason why the computer network can’t do the same.
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