Chasing the Sun for faster growth

Oracle has consolidated the Sun portfolio and keeping up with the “amazing range” of products in the systems portfolio has been time- consuming, Silver says. That time is paying off through sales in new product areas. In the X64 space Remora is dealing with a lot of opportunities with virtualisation and on Oracle VM, a free, fully supported product from Oracle. Silver says customers are keen to look at Oracle as an alternative to market leader VMware.

“The VMware market is so incredibly saturated that the Oracle VM is better for us. In any marketplace there is always room for more than one product.

“Oracle have a leading market share in the world for databases. It’s not Microsoft, it’s not Sybase. Now they’re rolling out their virtualisation strategy for Intel [processor-based servers]. This is the start of the wave.”

Silver says Oracle will gain market share in virtualisation as the product matures and because of the way it is licensed, which makes it much cheaper than VMware.

Like VMware, Oracle charges a licence fee by processor – but Oracle charges only for the processors used rather than installed. “If you install an Oracle database on VMware you still have to pay for two processors even if it only uses one processor. If you are using Oracle VM you only pay for one processor,” Silver says.

This pricing strategy can save a lot of money on big projects. Silver recently completed a virtualisation project with an education customer who chose Oracle over VMware because the latter was charging $220,000, double Oracle’s price.

“So this is the game we are playing. We believe the technology is mature enough to compete against VMware. If it’s not as good there’s no point backing it. These licensing constraint issues are making it a compelling reason to go down the Oracle VM path.”

Silver says Microsoft, which is also pushing its virtualisation product for free at the entry level, doesn’t offer the same favouritism in licensing with HyperV and client access licences (CALs).

The Splunk opportunity

Remora looks to Oracle for hardware but it is not the whole story. Along the way Remora picked up Splunk, an operational intelligence tool. Silver sees enormous potential with the technology and has become the vendor’s only premium partner

in Australia. “Splunk is a big focus. It ingests

machine generated logs from webservers, switching, firewalls, switches – anything that produces text-based logging, Splunk can ingest it. It allows monitoring of companywide infrastructure.”

Remora is developing consoles that show what is happening inside an organisation. It made a tool for Realestate.com.au which detected when people were “screenscraping” the website’s auction listings and pasting the content on their own, competing websites. The tool won Remora the Splunk award for partner of the year for the Asia Pacific.

Splunk is building an application store, similar in concept to iTunes, where companies can create applications or plugins for common data sources such as Cisco firewalls or Unix servers.

Remora is commercialising a number of different products targeting high-data producers in utilities. One scenario is a product that lets a CEO of an electricity retailer see on a daily basis how many kilowatts have been consumed that day and the corresponding revenue.