OCI Interview Transcript
Allyson
Welcome to the TechArena. My name is Allyson Klein, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Bev Crair of Oracle. She's a longtime player in the industry and a key leader of OCI's rise in cloud computing. Bev, why don't you go ahead and just start with an introduction of yourself and your role at Oracle.
Bev
Thanks, Allyson. It's good to chat with you. Thank you for the compliment. I think, being a longtime leader of anything worries me. So, as you said, I'm a senior vice president at Oracle responsible for OCI computing services. So I like to think of it as the kind of the bottom turtle of OCI. Right. So my team delivers all of those services associated with compute, including support for all of our hardware shapes, as well as our bare metal instances, our VMI infrastructure, and now containers and Google services.
Allyson
Now, I recently kicked off a series of interviews on cloud computing and and wrote about how the first time someone actually came up with the term was 25 years ago in an Emory University classroom, which was hard for me to believe. But as we enter this 26th year of cloud computing. When you look at that market and look at the next chapter of cloud computing, what are the key capabilities that enterprises are seeking from services today?
Bev
So, cloud services, fueled by technologies like AI and data analytics have exploded over the last several years. The momentum just really doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. According to Gartner, 85% end of enterprises will adopt a cloud first principle by 2025. So they're going to be focusing on how to free up It resources and deliver the most business value using cloud. The other thing that's happening is that the amount of data stored and managed and analyzed and monetized is massive. IDC's. Recent global data sphere forecast, right. So they've been delivering this Global Data Sphere forecast for years, but they are now predicting that data creation and replication will experience a 23% CAGR through 2025, leading up to 181 Zetabytes stored in the Datasphere by 2025. So that's actually a significant shift. Right. When I first started taking a look at this report back in 2015, 2016, the expectation was six or eight or ten petabytes. And then in 2020, I think the number was 64 petabytes. So we're not just dealing with more data, but we're actually dealing with an increasing speed of data creation, and cloud services need to deal with that. Right? So enabling and paying for in house infrastructure like compute and networking and storage to support that digital transformation. And the explosion of digital businesses brings with it a lot of challenges and costs to enterprises. And so today's cloud is actually helping companies meet those challenges by removing the need to invest in that expensive computing infrastructure and data centers and It resources, thus reducing capex. But enterprise can also leverage cloud technologies and resources to grow and innovate securely and reliably right, by accessing scalable cloud computing power and storage and networking capabilities that they need. So, because businesses only pay for what they need, they get to focus on where their IP matters and where they need that special sauce, and they can scale up and scale down quickly and effectively.
Allyson
I don't think that we really realize the true value of cloud until the Pandemic hit and we learned that the global economy was going to function based on cloud, that society was going to connect and, you know, simple things like feeding ourselves was going to happen through the cloud. I'm sure that for a company like Oracle, you learn some things along the way. While you were keeping businesses going with cloud computing, and you probably discovered some gaps in terms of industry technology, were there any key learnings that you saw that you said, I'm getting a new perspective here, or things that you think the industry needs to go work on together for the next chapter?
Bev
Yeah, so I use the 17 year figure right now. It's been more than 17 years since the cloud came about, right. And that's really when the promise of that idea of distributed access really started to be real, right. When S3 got released and Google Docs got released. And there's been a lot of progress, right. New services, new functionality, new players, new regions. So originally it was about enabling applications and enabling enterprises to run their workloads and applications on the cloud. But now the need is actually really about scaling the cloud to support that rapidly increasing demand that you talked about. It accelerated a lot during the Pandemic, but also a burgeoning number of new cloud services and that everything is a service model and the operational requirements that are challenging that system. For example, it's difficult to store and protect such a huge amount of information without overloading systems. So the resources required to manage and maintain those resources, maintain those workloads, especially across multiple clouds, is actually pretty significant. We're also seeing enterprises trying to deal with ever changing security and regulatory requirements, and customers concerns about privacy and data governance are actually escalating. Cost management is always at the forefront. Right. But increasingly, enterprises also want their cloud operated in their own country by their own citizens. And that's going to be, I think, even more important as customers grapple with things like data privacy or data governance or audit requirements. So all of these challenges, I think, are going to require cloud providers to be a lot more nimble and a lot less monolithic right, with more technology being delivered in a distributed cloud. As we seek to remove barriers to cloud service options.
Allyson
Now enter Oracle. You guys have an unquestioned software expertise and knowledge of the enterprise from the years that you've been working with enterprise on running their businesses, and you've got a growing cloud service business. It doesn't seem like a week goes by that I don't read an article about how OCI is growing and how it's gaining more traction with the enterprise. How are you guys unique in the market, and how does this perspective help you with customers in solving their challenges?
Bev
So I think most incumbent cloud providers want you to believe that cloud infrastructure is expensive and complex to manage and that multiple clouds can't work together, and that doing cloud is best left to a few large cloud providers. But OCI is changing that paradigm. We're the cutting edge of providing flex, flexible, simple, secure, and performance infrastructure that does more than just enable a workload, right? We enable some of the most demanding workloads where they run and then provide an integrated cloud experience across the board. And we do that because we understand that enterprises need clouds that flex to their environments, their requirements, not that require enterprises to somehow shoehorn themselves in to fit each and every cloud. So Oracle was recognized recently as a visionary in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud Infrastructure and platform services. And and I think that we achieved this in part because we believe in and support a few basic tenets, right?
One is that multi-cloud should be easy, impossible. OCI provides a comprehensive set of services to simplify multi-cloud and to simplify that deployment, including network database, data mesh, integration, security observability, and management. Oracle database services for Microsoft Azure is actually a really good example. That was the first one we instituted. It provides organizations with a simple path to a multi-cloud environment. The second tenant is the cloud is where people are. OCI is growing in both depth and breadth. We have over 40 Oracle cloud regions live around the world, with nine more planned just this year. And those range from public cloud commercial regions, regular OCI regions, to our national security regions for sensitive workloads, to our EU sovereign cloud regions that's focused on meeting the most stringent EU regulations. And all of these are built on uniformity with an ability to consistently scale up and scale down a region's footprint. So it's all the same cloud.
The third tenant, so we've got multi-cloud is easy and possible. The cloud is wherever people are. The third one is cloud should be able to be operated by anyone. Right? And so we recently announced Oracle's private label cloud, called Alloy that helps Oracle partners build their own cloud and gives our customers more choice. So partners use Alloy in their own data centers and fully control its operations to help address their own regulatory requirements. So we've got multi-cloud is easy and possible. The cloud is wherever people are. Clouds can be operated by anyone, and then pricing should be simple and uniform. Although we have 40 regions globally, we've actually got a simplified pricing structure, so customers no longer need to account for higher rates when they move or failover workloads from one region to another. And as a result, we actually enable much more predictable spending for our customers. So based on those tenants, right, oracle and UCI actually has experienced 88% growth in consumption the past year. If you haven't looked at our recent earnings announcements from the 12 December, go ahead and encourage you to take a look. Our customers are elated, right? We've got enterprises such as Zoom and Eight by Eight that enable remote collaboration. And they've got dramatic increases in adoption. And our cloud was actually able to scale to meet their demand without sacrifice.
We also did some work in the very beginning of COVID that actually continues. We helped fuel some innovation related to COVID and other diseases, now other diseases, by helping the CDC analyze vaccine safety with a system called VSafe, which is powered by OCI. And among other findings, that system helped researchers conclude that there weren't any adverse effects from the vaccine to bring up people. Another example is Vodafone, right? They're a great example of a customer using dedicated regions as a foundation of their digital transformation. NRI, Nomura Research Institute has actually just expanded their dedicated regions, and they're now using OCI to host and modernize two of their key financial services application. So lots going on.
Allyson
That's incredible. And you talk about it being simple. I understand that the underlying complexity of infrastructure to support that scale is something that you work on and your team works on every day. When you look at that underlying infrastructure, the stacks running on top of it. Things have gotten a little bit more complex than the early implementation of enterprise cloud. So is infrastructure in this environment still relevant to the customer? And if so, how? And how do you keep up with that complexity?
Bev
So I think infrastructure yes, absolutely. Is still relevant. Core cloud infrastructure is actually the foundation of the modern cloud estate I talked about at it kind of the bottom turn, right? Its purpose core infrastructure, its purpose is to get the job done consistently and effectively across a vast array of use cases and workloads. It has to continually evolve and improve to stay ahead, right? To keep ahead of the pace of innovation and to help solve some of those larger problems that we know are looming. At OCI, we provide the IaaS layer and path capabilities for cloud workloads with compute, containers, storage, networking that can radically simplify how customers can use core infrastructure. So our approach is to deliver that modern cloud experience that's flexible, simple, secure, and performant. And we know that one size doesn't fit all. So we deliver that infrastructure in a flexible way and in the right place to power those demanding workloads. So when I talk about flexible compute, there's a difference here that I think is really interesting. Our Flexible Compute instances can help customers dial in their cloud economics, right? Our block volume solutions can dynamically adjust to accommodate expanding workloads. Our GPU instances have the performance that are needed to address those AI ML workloads. So on the Flex instances for Compute, most providers offer hundreds of shapes, right, with various fixed CPU and memory ratios and allocations.
What OCI has done is we offer a flexible shape and configuration that can be used for any workload. So if your particular workload wants to if you want a virtual machine with nine CPUs and 27 gigs of memory, that's what you dial in. You can have exactly that and pay for only that, rather than having to fit into a shape that's kind of close and pay extra for stuff that you won't use in that context. Unlimited mode for burstable VMs is enabling continuous bursts, which is essential for running enterprise workloads cost effectively. Customers pay for a fraction of a CPU with the ability to burst as needed, and again, only pay for what they use. So the University of Jenna is doing research to determine how earthquakes behave, which I know for anybody that lives on the West Coast, is kind of an interesting and important topic. So they're building advanced earthquake models using computational fluid dynamics, and they needed a cloud that was both affordable and performant. So they're using our Ampere one compute platform solutions to get maximum value, exactly how they need it, with the very specific number of cores and a very specific amount of memory. So we talked about flexibility, the simple to use services. I think we've substantially reduced the complexity in things like container operations with our Kubernetes going under the hood. We recently introduced a complete serverless experience where customers can run applications in containers without having to operate any of the servers. And this has radically reduced the complexities of just dealing with Kubernetes around. Our Kubernetes service will actually also soon support virtual nodes for a truly complete serverless experience. So with virtual nodes, OCI manages the full lifecycle and infrastructure operations of the Kubernetes worker nodes for more reliable operations. And so customers still are only charged for the CPU and memory resources allocated to their instances.
We've also recently announced the Network Command Center, and that's a single pane of glass to provide complete visibility into the network topology, your performance and your security policy. So it was flexible, secure. Then there's built in security, right? OCI is offering simple prescriptive integrated security built into and around the OCI platforms so our customers can secure their cloud infrastructure and their data and their applications. And we also have Oracle Cloud Guard that allows our customers a simplified detection of things like misconfigurations or insecure activities across tenants. We just announced and we'll be launching OCI confidential computing, and that's going to protect data in use by encrypting it in memory with the enhanced virtualization using the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization SEV functionality. Just released. And then we've got OCI Network Firewall, which is the next generation cloud native firewall service, built using Palo Alto Networks technology as a turnkey firewall as a service infrastructure without the need to configure or manage that network security infrastructure.
So we had flexible, simple, secure and then performance. And we've always had this relentless focus on performance, whether we're dealing with compute, storage, networking, we have a high performance CPU and GPU infrastructure, nonblocking networks, and we've got RDMA cluster networking with only a one and a half microsecond latency that enables us to scale workloads up to 20,000 HPC CPUs and GPUs. So those are especially critical for things like AI training inferencing applications, highly scalable GPU infrastructure. So we've released our new GM4 and GU1 instances powered by Nvidia. We released our OCI Content Delivery Network service, and we're super excited to be working with Nvidia on next generation implementation. So we have massive TV GPU infrastructure environment.
Allyson
I love listening to your passion about your technology. That's something that's always been consistent about you ever since I met you, Bev, and that's lovely to hear today. You've talked a lot about what OCI is delivering. You've talked about the foundation and the infrastructure in terms of meeting customer demands. We're heading into a new year. My final question for you today is what do you see as the top of mind for customers as we head into 2023? And is performance still the primary driver? Is it data sovereignty? Is there something else on the table that will form the conversations with customers about how to adopt OCI and other cloud services and solve business problems?
Bev
I think performance is always a bedrock, right? I think it's going to continue to be critical to scale and power cloud computing moving forward. But it's also about offering customers more deployment choices, the capabilities that are fully accessible wherever and whenever a customer needs them. So that means cloud has to be less monolithic with more done in a distributed fashion. We call it distributed cloud rather than just at the edge or in a region with the highest levels of data governance and privacy and security. OCI has really been hard at work innovating and helping customers use the cloud in unique ways that they need 1s in order to consume cloud services. The location and data residency shouldn't be an obstacle for cloud adoption. Distributed clouds across public, multi-cloud, hybrid, and dedicated environments are going to enable customers to bring their applications and data into the cloud in the best way possible to support their requirements, not the cloud's requirements. So OCI's dedicated region, for example, brings cloud to the customer and reduces a customer's data center space needs and the overall price of the cloud for them. So that enables many more customers to get access to hundreds of cloud services in their own data center that they wouldn't have been able to get before if they had to go out to the quote unquote public cloud Oracle's database service for Microsoft Azure. I mentioned it before that enables a truly seamless multi-cloud experience.
So I think we're really going to see the more and more a requirement for cloud service providers to flex our infrastructure, flex our solutions to support what enterprises actually need. I think analytics and AI are going to continue to be critical. Our strategy is to provide that full range of data processing and analytics and AI capabilities, but also make them more efficient by minimizing the need to move and transform data. An example of this is our MySQL heat wave. That service provides a single data environment with no need for a separate analytics database and separate NL tools. And so OCI Services offers pre built models for converting audio to text into recognized images and detect anomalies. And it works directly on data in our object storage. And of course, you heard about our multi-year partnership with Nvidia to expand our collaboration there and bring the full Nvidia accelerated computing stack right from GPUs to systems to software to our OCI customers.
And I think finally, that question around efficiency is also becoming increasingly important as the cost of energy and the impact of global warming. The environment is more and more top of mind for everyone, right? 50% of our regions currently use renewable energy and energy efficient technology, and we made the commitment to be 100% by 2025. So I think it's not just about performance. I think it's really about making sure that we're offering customers more deployment choices with capabilities that are fully accessible whenever and wherever they need them be.
Allyson It's always a pleasure talking to you. I want to be mindful of your time and it's been wonderful as you've taken us on this journey. If folks want to keep the conversation going with you and your team, where would you send them for more information?
Bev
OCI.com. Right. OCI blog is very active. We post multiple times a day. Lots of stuff going on. You'll hear about our newest stuff, you'll hear about how our customers are using our stuff. There's always somebody who's actually going to repost something on LinkedIn or any one of the social media spaces, but OCI.com is the thing to pay attention to.
Allyson
Thanks so much for being on today. It's been a real joy.
Bev
Thanks, Allyson. It's great to hear from you. It's great to see you. I hope you have a great rest of your year.