Oracle will be offering a lot more integrated IT automation soon.
Speaking at the Oracle Open World 2014 conference this week, John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president, says that one of the issues that makes IT complex to manage is that separate tools are required to manage firmware, operating systems, virtual machines and applications.
Going forward, Fowler says Oracle plans to unify the management of all these functions, which will then be exposed via an implementation of the open source OpenStack cloud management framework, which Oracle plans to commercialize.
In fact, Oracle is already making much greater use of IT automation across its cloud-based database and application server services than what is currently available in the versions of those platforms deployed on premise.
Fowler says Oracle is trying to redefine IT lifecycle management across the enterprise, and that includes security. Oracle, for example, showed a preview of a new M7 system-on-a-chip (SOC) that includes Application Data Integrity technology that will secure applications and databases running in memory.
For IT organizations, the implications of highly integrated management frameworks are profound. Instead of spending most of their time maintaining systems, the IT staff should have more time to launch new projects that provide more business value, assuming they can develop the skills required to deploy things such as Big Data analytics applications.