Recent Posts by Philip J. Gill

Agribusiness moves toward SaaS and PaaS. By Philip J. Gill November/December 2015 Consumers know Land O’Lakes, Inc., best for its eponymous dairy products, but the 94-year-old agricultural cooperative—the third largest in the United States—is also a leader in animal feed, crop seeds, and crop protection as well as business services for its member-owners. The company’s IT division is integral to all of its operations. “We have one of the broadest views of any enterprise function...

Swiss insurance leader Die Mobiliar deploys Oracle Database In-Memory to speed business analytics. By Philip J. Gill May/June 2015 Founded in 1826, Die Mobiliar is the oldest insurance firm in Switzerland. From its headquarters in Berne, the national capital, the company’s network of 160 offices and more than 4,000 employees provides home, car, accident, and risk management insurance and other financial services to more than 1.6 million individuals and businesses throughout the...

Customer science leader dunnhumby speeds processing and increases business insights with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Big Data Appliance. By Philip J. GillMarch/April 2015 Consumers today have more choices than ever as to when, where, and how to purchase everything from groceries, clothing, and music to major appliances and automobiles—easily shifting their dollars from traditional bricks-and-mortar shops to online-only retailers, big-box stores, discounters, and...

Oracle Identity Management solutions secure sensitive applications and data on premises and in the cloud. By Philip J. Gill January/February 2015 In today’s digital world, companies are an electronic web of interlocking, ongoing, and highly flexible relationships among employees, consultants, contractors, business partners, and customers. Binding these various constituencies together is an internet that is moving beyond desktop-centric, browser-based connections. “The world in...

Oracle technology delivers rapid application development for the mobile enterprise. By Philip J. Gill September/October 2014 In today’s connected world, business happens everywhere. That’s why more and more organizations are realizing that their applications have to go with the business: from smartphones to tablets, enterprise applications are going mobile. This is where Oracle application development frameworks can help, by putting enterprise applications in the hands of mobile...

In Japan’s dynamic mobile telecom market, KDDI charts a steady course with Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 and Oracle Exadata Database Machine. By Philip J. Gill September/October 2014 Today’s dynamic global telecommunications market is a business in which new competitors arrive, new technologies displace existing ones, and new devices—from laptops to smartphones and tablets—sign onto networks seemingly every day. It is also one in which customers expect from their carriers just...

The latest SPARC chips and systems are at the center of better business processes. By Philip J. Gill July/August 2014 Server consolidation projects are designed to cut costs and improve data center performance, but companies deploying Oracle’s SPARC servers, including the SPARC T5 and SPARC M6 servers, are getting additional benefits as well. Whether it’s a hardware refresh or a complete revamp of IT infrastructure, these companies are finding that this new generation of SPARC...

New systems and more applications help drive many of today’s data center consolidation projects. By Philip J. Gill May/June 2014 Oracle Magazine spoke with Matthew Eastwood, group vice president, Enterprise Platform Research, International Data Corp. (IDC), about current trends in data center consolidation. Oracle Magazine: Hardware consolidation in the data center isn’t new, but there seems to be an uptick in such projects. What are the drivers behind data center hardware...

Oracle Database Cloud Service lets businesses concentrate on business. By Philip J. Gill March/April 2013 In an ideal world, information technology would just be there, like a gas or electric utility—invisible, transparent, always available when you need it but never in the way of getting down to the business at hand. With IT as a utility, businesses could just plug into the already-provided infrastructure and start operating, paying as they go and paying only for what they...