Guest blogging on The VAR Guy, John Shell writes on Reducing the Value of Solution Providers Through Engineering? (And, yes, that is a question as he poses it.)

The answer, as Shell, Director of Servers and Storage Enablement at Oracle, sees it involves recognizing the extent to which the ability to integrate web applications into contemporary IT environments is the "core value proposition for many channel partners."

Shell cites Oracle's application-to-disk strategy which reads, “Oracle plans to accelerate its R&D investments to optimize technologies across the technology stack and leverage development innovations that can only be delivered by a company that provides full stack, hardware and software solutions. These innovations are expected to deliver significant customer benefits including reducing the complexity of buying, implementing, and managing systems. Customers will benefit as their system performance, reliability, and security go up while systems integration and management costs go down.”

Where, Shell asks, does this leave integration as a service in the bottom line of high margin partner services. He adds that, " ... given the unique requirements and configurations dictated by the customer, these solutions still require a great deal of field-based optimization to realize their full value. If Oracle can reduce most of the issues that impact installation, stability, and management through integration, it will accelerate the optimization process for solution providers, allowing them to focus on tuning the solution metrics that matter most to customers, like price/performance or performance/watt."

According to Shell, solution providers will need to develop optimization expertise for the expanded market opportunities to be found there. In support of this contention he points to the example of the benchmark result from Siebel CRM Release 8.0 on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server running Oracle Solaris. This result stemmed, not from simply utilizing Sun hardware, but from the optimization and tuning that led to improvements in capacity, price/performance, space, and power metrics that beat the competition hands down, he asserts.

The services Oracle offers in its PartnerNetwork Specializations give customers exactly the tools they need to developing the necessary optimization skills. These include:

• Sun SPARC Enterprise T-Series (CMT) Specialization when the target application is multi-threaded. This also includes Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly Sun Logical Domains), which adds virtualization capabilities to the T-Series servers.

• Oracle Solaris, including DTrace, a dynamic troubleshooting and analysis tool

• Oracle Database 11g, and optionally, the Oracle Database Performance Tuning Specialization.

Finally, Shell writes, " ... the move by Oracle to reduce implementation headaches and risk creates a significant opportunity for solution providers to provide a higher level of value-added services to customers. Those that make the transition will not only find a broader, richer set of opportunities, but also help customers boost their overall datacenter efficiency."

More Information

New OPN Specializations and Training Resources for Sun and Oracle Technologies

Sun Technology-related Knowledge Zones Launched

Optimizing and Protecting Storage with Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Optimizing Applications with Oracle Solaris Studio Compilers and Tools

White Paper on the Oracle Solaris Operating System [...read more...]

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