Recent Posts by Sasha Banks-Louie

With demand surging for its online payment and loyalty services, Alliance Data Systems (ADS) decided in late 2018 that the time was right to move its on-premises financial applications systems to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The first payoff of that cloud shift will come from tasks processing 25% faster and costs falling 40% over the next three years. The second payoff will come from ADS’s IT teams spending a lot less time managing data center hardware. ADS will...

California Gull strutting along protected wetlands of the San Francisco Estuary [Chase Dekker Wild-Life Images/Getty Images]. In a newly launched project codenamed CityShark, the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy, and Utilities and several partners are enlisting drones to help identify and clean up liquid and solid waste from the Port of Aarhus, about 116 miles (187 kilometers) from the country’s capital city of Copenhagen. As aerial drones fly over oil and gas spills, trash...

Hispanolitcs/Getty Images Months after being tested under an emergency use authorization to treat COVID-19, the American Heart Association reported the pharmaceutical cocktail of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to have the potential to cause drug-induced heart complications for some patients with cardiovascular disease. While the pressure of a global pandemic put this decision in the spotlight, drug makers and regulators live with this tension all the time, balancing the...

DigitalVision/Getty Images Many companies have made big investments in on-premises applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, and they aren’t eager to move to software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps yet. But IT teams at those companies are tired of the cost and grind of running a data center to support on-premises workloads. The IT team at Burns & McDonnell was overloaded with administration and maintenance work to keep up with the strong growth in the firm’s engineering,...

Rolling out its second cloud region in Latin America and its 29th worldwide, Oracle is now offering a complete portfolio of in-country cloud infrastructure services in Chile. Located 18 miles (33 kilometers) from downtown Santiago, Oracle’s new availability domain provides Chilean companies with in-country data sovereignty, minimal data latency, and disaster recovery services on a massive scale. As one of the first hyperscale clouds to launch in Chile, Oracle...

Our ravenous appetite for online entertainment during the pandemic has pushed streaming video revenues to an estimated US$51 billion (£39 billion) this year, up nearly 20% from 2019. To feed this boom in viewer demand, studios need shows. But many studios allow only limited staff onsite, leaving animators, filmmakers, and production teams struggling to get the huge computing power needed to render today’s digital entertainment. That work has typically been done using server...

If any business can commission any number of cloud-based servers to access infinite compute capacity at relatively low cost, then why haven’t more companies moved their on-premises high-performance computing (HPC) workloads to the cloud? “The challenges are more around inertia and the thought process rather than anything technical,” said Karan Batta, vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), on a panel discussion during the SC20 virtual event on November 17. “If you...

Expanding its cloud computing presence in the UK, Oracle announces a new dedicated dual-region government cloud region and a second commercial cloud region in Newport, Wales. These resources not only provide a high-performance cloud infrastructure for the UK’s private sector. They also help support the UK government’s National Data Strategy, which aims to transform the country’s use of data to stimulate business growth and improve public services. That effort has taken on new...

Despite economic slowing during the coronavirus pandemic, India is expected to rebound in 2021, growing its economy by 6%, according to the newly published June 2020 World Economic Outlook report by the International Monetary Fund.  Helping fuel the forecasted growth is Manappuram, an Indian financial services company that provides online and mobile lending services for small businesses and farmers, many of whom are unbanked and don’t have enough financial resources to secure...