Sergio Giacoletto Blog

The Large Hadron Collider, CERN.

Last week I was privileged to be part of an event to celebrate 25 years of collaboration between Oracle and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.  And Oracle itself was privileged to have CERN's CIO Wolfgang von Ruden, and the European Commission's Director of Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, Mario Campolargo, speak at our event.

CERN, the world's largest particle physics centre, is located near Geneva. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. CERN physicists are studying what happens when the smallest known particles -- the fundamental building blocks of all things -- collide, to learn more about the laws of Nature.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC),a gigantic particle accelerator about 100 m underground, will revolutionise our understanding, from the miniscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe. Check out this animation which explains what the LHC is, how it works and how the data it produces will be processed and analysed by scientists around the world. It's very impressive.

I get a kick every time I visit CERN -- and I've been lucky to visit many times -- particularly as it is the birthplace of the World Wide Web. It was here in 1990 that Tim Berners-Lee conceived the idea of the web so it has particular relevance for Oracle, as we were one of the first companies to make its business applications available through the Internet.  Therefore, it was with great pride that we held a joint event to mark our 25 years of collaboration.

Possibly the greatest thing we have in common with CERN is innovation. At Oracle we have been innovating for over 30 years, and we have 16,000 engineers in over 20 countries focused on building innovative solutions, and today all our innovation is customer-driven. 

In my opinion, research and development (R&D) models are shifting. They are moving away from the supply-side approach of big firms funding ambitious projects that create large barriers to entry, towards a demand-driven approach focused more on speed and need of customers. I speak to customers all the time who give input on what they need for their businesses, and we give that feedback to our developers.  

We don't innovate just in isolation, either. R&D is undertaken today less and less in an ivory tower, and more in partnerships between academia, industry and governments. A collaborative approach is crucial to successful innovation to encourage the intersection of ideas in a multidisciplinary environment. Research topics are exploring areas where the impact on economy and society can be maximized to deliver the most return on investment. 

R&D is not cheap.  Funds for pure R&D are reducing, and increasingly organizations need to justify the investment at any level via commercialisation of innovation. Therefore collaboration makes both intellectual and commercial sense.

And the use of information technologies, such as grid computing which CERN utilises, can accelerate the innovation process.  CERN uses Oracle technologies such as Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and Oracle Streams is a core part of the LHC infrastructure enabling CERN to replicate data to 11 global sites, from Taiwan to Oxford, Bologna to New York. This project has seen CERN push Oracle Streams to the limits of its throughput capability.

At Oracle, we have collaborative innovation programs with our Partners such as Nokia, Intel and Siemens, and with many academic institutions and research centres across EMEA.   In 2004, we created the Oracle Innovation Award Program for partners and in the last three and a half years, over 400 partners have participated from 39 different countries. 

I firmly believe that Europe has massive creative and innovative potential and we have Oracle Competency Centres in cities such as Dublin, Warsaw, Istanbul, and Malaga where continuous innovation brings huge benefits for our customers in telecommunications, consultancy, and many other areas.

Additionally, we are accelerating our innovation to more rapidly meet customer demand.  By its very nature, R&D and innovation must be far-sighted in its objectives as it is planning for the future. It needs to anticipate what we will all be using in five or ten or fifteen years' time.  And it needs the best tools -- that's where IT can help. 

We're constantly looking to bring the latest technologies to our customers, to help them plan the future success of their organisations.  And working with prestigious institutions such CERN as a very small part of their enormously important project is one of the more exciting parts of my job.