Seated amidst the hustle bustle of the Oracle Day 2013 held at the Pearl Continental Hotel in Karachi on September 3, 2013, Oracle’s Director of Enterprise Architecture, Joshua Chuan spoke about his time at the organization. Having started his career at Oracle in 1997, he has been associated with the company for over a decade now. The journey has been a professionally fulfilling one for Joshua who revealed that he works with “a diligent team comprising of enterprise architects. Together we work on creating architectures to help our valuable customers in building their IT infrastructures.”
Speaking about Enterprise Architecture, the main component of his work at Oracle Enterprises, Joshua spoke at some length about what the term actually entails. It “refers to building IT infrastructures for the organizations. Simply put, it is like building a house for the organizations to secure their data and systems. However, the size of the house may vary depending upon the needs of the clients. This means that if a customer demands a bigger house, more architectural work will be required. We make sure that we satisfy the requirements of our customers and help them in bridging the gap between IT and infrastructure,” he explained.
Since quality of a product/service is evaluated on the basis of a client’s response and how quickly it adopts it, it is essential to determine those elements that Johsua thinks come into play in faster adoption of Enterprise architecture. Asserting that faster adoption is related to the need and urgency of an organization, he stated that, “I believe more important than everything is how much supportive a business or environment of the organization is for the adoption and implementation of Enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture won’t work in the organizations which do not support this and thus adoption will be sluggish.”
Since Oracle has always something great to offer for its large customer base in Pakistan and worldwide, Mr. Joshua told on Oracle Day 2013 that the company is unveiling Oracle Database 12 C in Pakistan. Shedding light on the significance and uniqueness of this offer, he stated that 12 C is the first multitenant database for cloud offering improved security feature. He added that, “12 C allows automatic data optimization and is capable of handling large-size data, which is also referred as big data worldwide.”
As the name suggests, multitenant architecture encompasses multiple attributes, which have not been offered before by one server host. Its immenseness and versatility delivers several benefits to customers that Joshua revealed this way, “Oracle 12C is about the support for container database, a pluggable database on top of it, and copy/ back up container database. With this type of architecture, manageability and optimization of the database becomes much simpler for the customers.”
Emphasized as cloud-specific database, Joshua also explained that how it would benefit the organizations that are looking for cloud computing. Speaking at the event he told, “When you look at cloud, it’s all about multitenancy, self service and broad network. This new database offers cloud-specific features and thus it is quite favorable and useful for the companies that adopt cloud computing. Secondly, it offers enhanced security features.” He added, “Another special attribute of 12c is data reduction quality, which enables uses to create profiles and mask data on the net. If a user decides to see the data and he is not allowed to, then the data is masked, but if he is allowed to see the data then the data is not masked.”
Security becomes the biggest concern for companies that plan to move to cloud computing and thus it is important that this database addresses all security concerns of the organizations. Mr. Chua highlighted security feature several times at the event and further told that, “It is like, when you look at security for public and private cloud, Oracle database provides a lot of different options of security. Its advanced security option allows encryption of data at rest as well as in transit, which are two types of encryption. When you are in private cloud, you want to make sure that the data at rest is encrypted and people can access it. When you are in public cloud, you want to make sure that data passing through the wire is also encrypted, and that gives you security.” He added that factors like different migration passes, in place upgrade, data extraction tool, and 11 migration further reinforce 12C’s security.
Talking about migration, Mr. Joshua explained that moving onto another database or an updated version is not easy unless an organization has fair knowledge about a new technology. He stated that, “If something offers enhanced features it is indispensable to switch to it. Information in this situation therefore becomes critical. Information guides one person and helps in migrating from one system to a new one.” He added that size of the organization is also a significant factor if it decides to migrate to a new database. “Since, companies are meeting their organizational requirements and improving processes through IT, they would definitely like to migrate to advanced technologies and hence would give 12c a shot,” he told.
When it is about technologies and their adoption, it is always interesting to know that how Pakistan responds to new products as compared to rest of the world. According to Joshua Chuan, Pakistan is quite adaptive towards new advancements and aims to incorporate them in their organizations. However the local organizations are bit reluctant towards new wrinkles as compared to other countries, where inclination towards updated and advanced technologies is greater than Pakistan. While concluding the conversation, he stated that, “I have seen the adoption of many of Oracle’s products and services in Pakistan and I am very sure that Oracle will get an overwhelming response for 12C from this country.”
