In a presentation to analysts, customers, and the press at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last week, Oracle president Charles Phillips unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g which is intended to help customers maximize business agility and productivity by providing an integrated approach to IT management.
"It's about finally trying to get control of this complex thing called IT - trying to manage the entire stack in a way that is different that is different than we have in the past. We are just now getting to the point in the evolution of the industry and in Oracle's strategy where that is now possible," Phillips said. Management has often been built as an afterthought, emphasized Phillips, with IT vendors focusing on innovation in their various layers.
Oracle has sought to achieve a complete stack, Phillips said. "That is what is going to allow us to add more value not only in management but in performance and security. It is the interdependencies between these layers that cause a lot of the issues.
With the strategy of management built up front, Oracle can test the stack together and certify certain configurations that it knows perform well, package and deliver components in suites together when possible, with coordinated upgrades and support throughout the stack, explained Phillips. "We have been thinking this way and slowly building up this stack over the years; it took the last 30 years to assemble all this. Now that we have servers and storage and operating systems - the entire stack now - we can start to build management tools that allow you to understand and manage this entire stack together."
Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g introduces business-driven application management, which enables IT to be more responsive to business priorities and deliver greater business value by managing to key metrics for user experience and business transactions; as well as integrated systems management and support, which allows IT to be more proactive through knowledge sharing with Oracle support and the broader Oracle community.
Additionally, by providing integrated application-to-disk management, Oracle can simplify management by eliminating the need to use multiple tools at every layer of the stack - from packaged applications through middleware, database, operating system, virtualization, and hardware - and help maximize return on IT investment.
If you are using multiple Oracle products together, you should get incremental value, from performance through integrated software and hardware, and through a single security approach, but a big piece of that is management, according to Phillips. "We can simply manage things that we have built better than things that we haven't built and that is for any management vendor," he said.
"Now that we can instrument the entire stack, because it is our stack, we can do things we couldn't do before," Phillips told the audience at the close of his keynote. There is value in being able to get a handle on management costs and gain more predictable environments so downtime is not a threat, and integration is not a struggle, he stressed. "No one has been able to crack that code. I can't claim we have cracked it completely because we are just on the beginning of this journey, but this is the approach to do it. What we are building is kind of the iPod for the enterprise," Phillips noted, "You have hardware and software working closely together and because it is built by the same company, you can manage it better, as well. Enterprise Manager is our product for doing that."
For complete information about the new capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, go here.