Barry N. Perkins - Vice President: Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions & Oracle Modernization

In this first blog entry, I would like to share some background about myself, my life at Oracle, and current business focus. My goal is to provide regular entries on this blog with the hope that they will be meaningful, provide some insight into life at Oracle, and our pursuit of a common goal, to create while delivering value and results. It is amazing what can be accomplished with focus, careful execution, a great team, and the tremendous resources that comprise Oracle.

My History
Since joining Oracle in 1986, I’ve worked in various capacities and divisions throughout the company, including sales, marketing, product marketing, product management, alliances, pre-sales, performance, development, consulting, support and education.

After nearly 30 years in the hi-tech industry, and 23 years at Oracle, I’ve been involved with thousands of customers of all sizes, in all industries, all major geographic regions, at all levels of their businesses, and visited many at one or more of their sites.

I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything! Seeing how companies run their businesses on solutions we provide is a powerful experience. There are so many factors that contribute to success. The ones that stand out the most to me based on my experiences include being creative, flexible, thriving on and exploiting change while over-delivering in execution. I’ve always enjoyed looking at where we can go, finding a way to get there, and making sure we achieve our objective.

Creating a vision, identifying new markets, new market trends and new business opportunities is exciting. Turning all of these into reality is gratifying, especially when that reality involves helping customers become successful while growing Oracle’s business. Doing this well, is hard work, but can deliver tremendous results.

During my days of university study in Computer Sciences, the world of technology was very, very different than today. Through the intervening years, while so much has changed, some key elements still remain true. Although it may sound old fashioned, a key tenant to my work life, is customer first. If we do what is right for our customer, over the long term, it will be good for Oracle.

Where I am now, is a direct result of where I have been, and the sum of the experiences along the way. The businesses that I am proud to lead are all about helping our customers and Oracle drive new business, into new markets, with new technologies, always with a strong focus on making everything real.

Some years back, all threads started to converge into a single direction and an idea formed. Turning my ideas into a vision, establishing that vision, justifying the investment, building the businesses and then leading those businesses to success became a passion for me.

Delivering on a vision by driving these ideas from conception into successful reality has been a wild ride. I have the honor, privilege and global responsibility for driving the Oracle Modernization and Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions businesses and accountability for delivering results. The size, scale and success of these businesses is a direct result of the dedication and hard work of the highly skilled, talented and intelligent people not only within my team, but those across other divisions and from external partners that comprise the ecosystem supporting these businesses.

Oracle Modernization
Oracle Modernization is focused on enabling companies to strategically transform their business into a more agile, cost efficient, and profitable business, by modernizing their legacy IT systems with Complete, Open and Integrated business solutions from Oracle. This is achieved by leveraging current content and investment, to create a highly integrated solution that blends what you have, with what you need.

Our objective is to provide tactical solutions within a strategic framework, breaking down the larger complex problem, into discrete and manageable challenges. For each individual challenge, the best solution is determined and comprises a combination of products from within the broad spectrum of Oracle’s Applications, Middleware and Technology software portfolio.

To accomplish our objectives, we follow a consultative solution sales approach, always working in conjunction with the local Oracle account team. The Oracle Modernization Sales team provides valuable subject matter expertise that includes both business and technical domains, We work with business leaders to identify their business goals, objectives, needs and requirements. From there, we help drive those business needs into reality by transitioning technology from systems that no longer meet business needs, into solutions that meet, or exceed the needs of current and future business requirements. A key to success is creating a high level strategy and roadmap along with execution plans that manage/balance risk, change and cost, to deliver maximum business value/benefit at whatever pace best suits the business. The resulting solutions are based on open systems, open standards and an open architecture, thus providing a solid foundation for the future.

Partners play an important role by providing discrete modernization tools and technologies, as well as services to implement the modernization solutions. The Oracle Modernization Partner Solution team is responsible for building and maintaining the Oracle Modernization Alliance (part of the comprehensive Oracle Partner Network), an alliance of best-of-breed modernization vendors.

From initial engagement, through successful implementation, the Oracle Modernization Sales team will lead and guide the process, leveraging the entire breadth and depth of Oracle, and the Oracle Modernization ecosystem as and when appropriate.

You can find more detail about Oracle Modernization here on Oracle.com.

Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions
Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions is a business development engine focused on delivering high value, integrated solutions with Oracle software (Applications, Middleware, Technology) on IBM Servers, using best practices based upon Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture and Application Integration Architecture, and years of experience.

As part of Oracle’s ongoing efforts to grow into new markets, with new technologies, the team provides sales education about Oracle for Linux on IBM System z to Oracle, IBM and other business partners and customer education through Design Workshops.

The Oracle/IBM Integrated Solution team provides sales support with subject matter expertise, covering a broad spectrum of topics to ensure that customers can make intelligent and informed decisions as they deploy their Oracle software based solutions.

Backing up that sales support, is the Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions Center, a team of expert engineers, staffed by Oracle and IBM. This team defines reference architectures, determines best practices, provides hands on training, and runs Proof of Concepts to validate solution functional delivery They also validate that proposed solutions will deliver in the real world by executing Test to Scale projects that ensure our solutions meet or exceed customers service level objectives related to performance, throughput, high availability and disaster recovery.

Summary
Modernization is on the minds of just about every IT professional these days meaning that there is still a substantial amount of work to do. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a many talented and dedicated people, our businesses continue to thrive and deliver strong value/benefit to our customers.

I appreciate this opportunity to tell you a bit about myself and the businesses that I have had the pleasure of developing and managing at Oracle and look forward to sharing more exciting details with you in the near future.

Over the past 18 months, the global economic malaise has presented huge challenges for many businesses. Revenue challenges are driving a tremendous level of corporate introspection. Much of what was taken for granted, or assumed to be untouchable, is now coming under the corporate eye for review and justification. What should be kept, what should be changed, what can be changed, and what should be shut down or sold off are serious questions being faced by nearly all businesses that I talk with.

This corporate introspection results in serious discussions and tough decisions, of which “reducing costs” in IT is a common thread.

Reducing Cost
IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to do more with less. While the focus of doing more with less isn’t a new topic, the intensity and detail of scrutiny is. In my 23 years at Oracle, I’ve experienced many downturns. This one is different, at least for the Oracle Modernization business that I lead. How? This time there are many options for solving the challenges presented by legacy software and infrastructure.

• How is money being spent?
• What is money being spent on?
• Does the expenditure make sense?
• Can costs be reduced?

Reducing cost is an imperative, an important tactical discussion focused on keeping a company alive and operational today. However, what about tomorrow? Considering the future expands the focus from tactical survival to include strategic direction and drive – introducing the concept "spend wisely." Combining the tactical and strategic discussions, results in a focus on economic efficiency – getting the most business value from the investment while also reducing costs.

Example
Let’s look at an example. For the case of discussion, we’ll assume a customer is running a mission critical application system built with COBOL and using some legacy data store (e.g. VSAM, IMS/DB, IDMS, Adabas). And… since this is Oracle, we will look at the target environment being based upon Oracle software.

The example customer runs a global manufacturing business. As a direct result of the current economic situation, they have an immediate need to reduce cost, thus IT is pushing hard to find technology solutions that will reduce costs.

Rehosting
Rehosting is a logical approach - an approach where the data is migrated from the legacy datastore(s) to an Oracle Database, while the application is also rehosted, but kept in COBOL. While this relatively simple solution can result in significant cost reduction, the resulting system is still legacy, with all the challenges and limitations remaining unchanged, delivering limited business value/benefit.

Often, this is the end of any modernization discussion/focus, and the legacy systems remain, preventing the company from growing into the future. While this provides a solid solution to a tactical pain point, it begs the question, “What next?"

Enhancing value
With the cost savings in place, the company in question might look at where to go from here: build new systems; implement packaged applications; re-architect the old ones; integrate with SOA; etc… This is a multiphase approach that uses rehosting to “find” funding from within existing budget to drive a more strategic modernization project that delivers increased business benefit/value.

Changing the Game
What if we reorder the discussion, rather than immediately stepping into a rehost project, the discussion is altered to include two key questions:
• What is the 5 year goal for your business?
• What limits/prevents you from achieving your 5 year goal/objectives?
The answers to these questions can deliver surprising results. Going back to the global manufacturing company that we mentioned above, we find that while they need to reduce costs, they want to become a more dynamic, competitive manufacturer that can react/respond more readily to changes in the global economy, their customer needs, etc… and one of the key factors limiting their growth/transformation is their legacy systems. This is a common response, and a very typical situation.

Solving their key challenge means solving the legacy challenge, begging the question:

• What do these legacy systems do?

Now we find a very interesting fact… the existing legacy systems provide business functionality that is basically GL (general ledger) and SCM (Supply Chain).

Let’s consider the business factors: limitations in the legacy GL and SCM systems, prevent the manufacturing company from seeing their business real time, thus, to keep the assembly line moving, they must ensure they never run out of inventory in the supply chain, therefore, often, an excess inventory is required, and purchasing isn’t able to negotiate the best purchase prices.

New GL and SCM capability/functionality provided by a complete, open and integrated solution comprised of Oracle’s E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware (including SOA) and Technology (database, etc…) that can provide real time visibility into the business. Visibility that enables the manufacturing company to adopt a just in time inventory process, resulting in a reduced inventory, and buy at better prices, both freeing up cash (frequently large amounts) that can be used to grow/transform the business.

Now, the manufacturing company is into a discussion of financing the immediate project from future cash savings. The result, they get the final solution that provides maximum business value/benefit more quickly, and at reduced cost.

Summary
We’ve discussed three different approaches to the same problem, all that use “found” funding. One solution helps reduce costs while the other two enable the company to:
• Reduce cost
• Build a system to supplies a solid foundation upon which to grow the business
• Deliver great business value/benefit
• Provide solutions tailored to that company

This is only a small example of how we can be of service to you. Engaging with Oracle, and our Oracle Modernization business ensures that all tactical and strategic challenges are well understood, and factored into a comprehensive modernization roadmap that drives near term gains and long term success.