The promise of cloud: ASEAN IT sceptics get a taste with Ravello

Fresh after making its bold stamp as a cloud company during last September’s annual Oracle Open World, Oracle Malaysia’s Managing Director Fitri Abdullah noted a positive uptick in the number of attendees to Malaysia’s Oracle Cloud Day.

“There has been a 20-percent increase this year to over 220 participants,” he said, adding also that there is good response from customers and partners to Oracle’s announcements last September.

With the average tenure of CEO declining to 18 quarters of late, CEO priorities to gain share, remain relevant with innovative products and services have been never more important during this time of disruptive and disrupted business models.

Fitri Abdullah

But priorities have been difficult to execute, because cost of operations are expected to lower as well; S&P 500 companies have only had an average of 1-percent growth in sales while earnings on average show 5-percent growth.

This implies that costs are being managed. And cloud is one of the ways to do this.

As though in testament to this, Fitri shared a long list of companies that use Oracle cloud apps – Motorola, Lyft, Pandora, Orange Telecom, HSBC and more.

Closer to home, there is also UEM Group, Fitri commented, “It’s a digital transformation project worth RM150 million over the next three years.”

About the overall Malaysian market, Fitri observed, “The momentum in cloud is happening, gaining ground and moving in a fast manner.”

And yet…

In the bigger scheme of things, despite all that take up, only ten-percent of businesses have moved their workload to the cloud. Oracle views it as their sacred duty to increase this number with no less than seven announcements last September, to do with their second-generation Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform.

Oracle ASEAN director of Cloud Platform Business Development, Kirsten Gibertson said, “Underpinning our cloud strategy, is this concept of choice; multiple paths to cloud.”

Having kicked off their IaaS offerings with General Purpose Compute that delivered 11.5 times faster provisioning at 20-percent cost reduction, Oracle now offers more configurations like container cloud services, utility-based bare metal services, elastic cloud, engineered systems as the foundation and a crowd favourite, dedicated compute behind customers’ firewalls.

Another favourite, especially among companies that are dabbling with the idea of cloud, is Oracle’s Ravello service, which moves virtual machine-based workloads easily to the public cloud.

Public clouds usually support one hypervisor, so migrational effort has to happen when hypervisors on-premise are from a different vendor.

Using nested virtualisation technology, Ravello is a duration-based service that is proving to be useful for companies that want to spin up development and testing environments, for example.

One case in point is Deutsche Telecom.

Ravello enables the telco to do SIP-based telephony feature and stress testing, so that they can quickly see how to bring new services to market. To date, there are 100 Ravello trials happening in Southeast Asia and Oracle’s growth markets in South Asia. That said, there are industries like telcos and utilities that are moving beyond just trials with Ravello.

Gibertson clarified that the service is not a migration tool but allows companies to quickly go to cloud with a consistent IT configuration posture as their on-premise IT environment.