Global CIO: Oracle's Fowler Says Systems Performance About To Explode

InformationWeek -- Oracle executive vice president of systems John Fowler clearly revels in the significant new investments Larry Ellison is pumping into every facet of Fowler's organization: the hiring each day of more engineers, the expansion in scale and funding for chip development, the creation of advanced systems running thousands of threads and handling hundreds of terabytes of memory, and imagining what the "refactored" storage and server systems of the future will look like.

But what really animates the already-mercurial Fowler are his ideas for how all that geeky, inside-the-labs stuff can be expressed in business environments to unleash for clients opportunities wring unprecedented customer and marketplace insights out of the mountains of data and information that they're accumulating today faster than they know how to manage it.

"On our server systems, now that we're with Oracle, we plan on at least doubling performance every two years," Fowler said in a recent interview on the former Sun campus about 20 minutes from Oracle headquarters. "That's pretty aggressive, but actually, that's not really the exciting part because what's really happening in most enterprises is that what people would like to do is to operate on, say, 10 times the information they have today. So whether it's consumer analytics, or collecting smart-meter data in the utilities thing, or becoming very much better at seismic and oil exploration, or to properly handle national health-record systems.

"There's just an endless number of examples where if you can take a richer data in-feed, and you have a set of data models behind it that let you look at all that in five or six or 10 different ways instead of in just one way, you can accelerate your business. I don't care if you're in transportation, if you're in banking, manufacturing, the military, telephony—all of those areas really benefit if they can enrich the data and speed up the access to that data and thereby gain great advantage. To me, that's the most exciting aspect of infrastructure development today."

Oh yes—and it all has to be done in real time. Read more >>

Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World

InformationWeek -- If you think Larry Ellison and Oracle are developing complex and byzantine schemes to turn the computer industry upside down, consider the reaction of Oracle executive VP John Fowler upon meeting Ellison and coming aboard as the highest-ranking former Sun executive.

"I didn't know Larry before the acquisition except by reputation," Fowler says, "so, like most executives in this situation, I spent a little time familiarizing myself with my key financial numbers so I could try to seem particularly intelligent when we met.

"But in the very first discussion Larry had with me, he wanted to know the cache sizes of all my processors. He wanted to talk about clock rates and cache sizes!" Fowler says with a laugh. "And every single meeting with Larry since then has been identical on these broad topics: How do you make the products better, where do we need to be investing more, how do we make all the products work better together, and how do we deliver them better for customers?

"And so it's actually kind of a simple place in that regard -- and it all flows from Larry." Read more >>