Recent Posts by Sasha Banks-Louie

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...

After recovering from back-to-back deficits to win their playoff games against the Houston Texans and Tennessee Titans, the Kansas City Chiefs are heading to Super Bowl LIV to determine the National Football League champion.  These thrilling comebacks have given fans an insatiable appetite for all things Chiefs, which only increases the pressure on the franchise’s content and media team.  While a steady stream of game highlights, fantasy football statistics, and clips of...

While plastic is convenient, durable, and cheap, 50% of all plastics (about 150 million tons every year, worldwide) are used only once and then thrown away. Even for those who dutifully recycle our plastic water bottles and sandwich bags, we’re only tackling a small part of the problem. That’s because heavy winds and rain carry huge amounts of plastic waste along city streets and into the stormwater system, where it likely flows directly into creeks, rivers, bays, and...

Car-sharing startup GreenGo offered just 45 electric cars to customers in Budapest when it launched its eco-friendly service in 2016. A year later, the company had expanded its fleet to several hundred Volkswagen e-up! vehicles in the city. Cofounder and managing director Bálint Michaletzky knew the company needed 300 cars in Budapest to reach its profit targets, but what he didn’t know was how the company was going to operate such a fast-growing mobile business. “We didn’t...