To be competitive, organizations are looking to use technology to drive innovation into their products and services, and simultaneously deliver efficiencies. The Cloud promises to be an enabler for business transformation – providing the agility for organisations to rapidly learn and adapt with less risk of failure, and at lower cost. Cost is a consideration but more than that, it provides an opportunity to reduce waste and improve efficiencies.
Matt Wright, CTO, Rubicon Red, says “Digital transformation presents a significant opportunity for our customers in terms of driving innovation and accelerating time to business value. As organizations adopt new technologies and move to blended solutions comprising SaaS, private cloud and on-premise apps, integration plays a critical role.”
Rubicon Red, a globally recognized and awarded thought leader in Oracle middleware, recommends a phased approach to help organizations modernize their IT environments, migrating from largely on-premise systems, to hybrid cloud environments. Through a phased approach, Oracle Middleware customers can get the combined the benefits of Cloud plus DevOps to upgrade their environments, adopt cloud, streamline development processes, and concurrently minimize risk and cost.
Matt says, “We can help customers migrate from Oracle SOA 11g to SOA 12c, establish a cloud platform to seamlessly run Oracle SOA 12c on the Cloud, optimize their integrations, and drive further innovation through new integrations, SaaS extensions, new processes or mobile channels.”
The Best Recipe: Cloud + DevOps
Moving Oracle Middleware development to the cloud (lift and shift) is a natural first step, and when coupled with a DevOps strategy means organizations can streamline their development processes. “Organizations that fully embrace the cloud for Dev and Test are experiencing more than 30 percent time savings upon maturing their DevOps capabilities[i],” says Matt.
When it comes to running Oracle Middleware in the Cloud, customers have a couple of options. Oracle Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides the breadth and depth of functionality to rapidly build and deploy rich applications and extend Oracle Cloud SaaS apps and integrate with existing business-critical IT systems. SOA Cloud Service and Integration Cloud Service are the ideal approach for Oracle middleware customers to migrate their integrations to the cloud. Alternatively, customers could select an Infrastructure as a Service provider and install the Oracle SOA Suite.
To unlock the commercial and speed to market benefits of developing in the cloud, the process of taking code developed and tested in the cloud and deploying it into production needs to be frictionless. The key pre-requisites to achieving this are having a standardized and automated process for building and deploying code across all environments.
This is where Rubicon Red MyST, the end-to-end DevOps solution for Oracle Middleware, comes into it’s own for provisioning, configuration and release automation across cloud and on-premise, irrespective of your cloud provider. “MyST allows you to easily configure an Oracle SOA Cloud Service to replicate your production environment or provision and configure a Middleware as a Service on top of an existing IaaS provider – as well as fully automate the build out of your on-premise production environments,” assures Matt. Further, “MyST allows clients to establish a single integrated process for automating the promotion of the Oracle Middleware platform configurations and application deployment through each and every phase of the software delivery lifecycle—from development and testing to production, both in the cloud and on-premise.”
“Combining cloud-based development with DevOps is the perfect combination – reducing development time, whilst concurrently minimizing risk and cost,” says Matt. He goes on to share a great example of Cloud plus DevOps at an Australian Oil and Gas company. “Using MyST, they can provision a new Dev/Test environment on the cloud in less than 60 minutes, whereas previously it would take 4-8 weeks to provision a new environment, manually. And, using the MyST release automation capabilities, they’ve slashed release time from 4-8 hours to ~15 minutes.” Leveraging the cloud provides faster project start-up time and improves developer productivity, giving them the agility and efficiency to rapidly deliver on new projects.
Accelerate Speed to Value through Oracle Cloud KickStart
Matt emphasizes that the potential for business innovation through cloud is unprecedented and recommends that while a phased approach is best to migrate existing systems and bed down hybrid cloud infrastructure, organizations must, in parallel, begin to evaluate and prototype solutions that will drive the next wave of innovation. “With Oracle Cloud, continually evolving cloud services open the door to new business opportunities with disruptive cloud innovations using social and mobile services, big data, content collaboration, and the Internet of Things.”
Through their Oracle Cloud KickStart program, Rubicon Red provides a rapid on-ramp to Oracle Cloud. “Using our unique blend of Oracle expertise, best practices and agile development methodologies, our Cloud KickStart gives you everything you need to qualify, quantify and prove your transformation use-case with Oracle Cloud in just two-weeks – it is the best way to quickly get the green light on your next business transformation project,” concludes Matt.
[i] A 2013 Survey by Evans Data Cloud Development Survey, found that cloud platforms reduce overall development time by an average of 11.6 percent, 38 percent cited savings in the 11 to 20 percent range, whilst 10% had experienced more than more than 30 percent in time savings.
About the Author
Juliana Button is a passionate tech marketer, Manager – Marketing & Events at Rubicon Red. Prior to this, she was Director Product Management, Oracle Corporation, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Cloud Platform, working at Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores and in Australia.
