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April 07, 2008
Oracle's XTP Sage Shares his Wisdom
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In this interview, Cameron Purdy, Oracle's vice president of Fusion Middleware development, discusses how customer demands for extreme transaction processing are evolving, as well as how use cases for Coherence (the data grid solution Purdy developed as founder of Tangosol) have evolved since becoming part of the Oracle software family.
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GRIDtoday: What industries are using Coherence, and what industries are taking advantage of XTP, in general?
CAMERON PURDY: A few key industries are probably our No. 1 driving factor both in terms of technology and, in a lot of cases, the revenue associated with the product. By a statistically significant margin, the No. 1 is still financial services. Financial services, from an XTP point of view, drove our initial move into the grid environment and continues to drive a substantial portion, and the extreme portion, of the XTP vision in terms of the features on which we focus. Those features turn out to be universally appropriate in every industry we’re working in, but because of the competitive nature of [the financial services] industry, coupled with the grid brains that have been vacuumed into that industry for their ability to solve some of these problems, financial services has remained the biggest adopter of XTP to date. But it’s certainly not the only one.
Online systems are another huge driver. So online retailers, online travel systems and online gaming companies -- the other side of the financial market, the ones who bet on horses instead of stocks -- traditionally have been and continue to be a pretty big chunk of market that we serve.
We continue to work with a growing list of logistics companies, and we’ve been very successful in that market. One of our customers in that market mentioned to us that they are an IT organization that happens to ship packages. Commensurate with being in that market there is a huge volume of information -- rapidly changing information -- and lots of ways to make small optimizations have a big impact on the bottom line. That certainly is one of the use cases for which our product has been very popular -- the ability to draw significant conclusions from massive heaps of information. We’ve been very successfully adopted by telcos, as well, and utilities for the same reasons: large amounts of information, requirements for uptime, systemic availability.
I’d say over the last year, and probably as a side effect of being part of the Oracle organization, a lot of the adoption we’re seeing has been associated with large companies and organizations and their uptake of service-oriented architectures. As that first wave of SOA has taken hold of the industry, it has certainly propelled Coherence in terms of the requirement for creating systemic availability, for creating continuous availability of systems, and being able to scale out critical services.
When you think of infrastructure, you don’t necessarily think of SOA as being a driving factor behind extreme transaction processing, but if you think about it, if SOA actually takes off within an organization, you’re going to have a relatively small number of services that end up far exceeding their original dedicated footprints. When something is popular in an operating world, the same Slashdot effect that we saw on the Web 10 years ago applies to services in a service-oriented architecture. As you start to expose valuable information within an organization, as soon as becomes available, everyone with an Excel spreadsheet, anyone with Javascript capabilities, let alone your IT organization using .NET, Java or anything back to COBOL, now has the ability to grab that information from you and submit transactions to you. The end result is SOA generates a requirement for additional availability, but it also generates incredible hotspots in terms of infrastructure -- the requirement to be able to scale out systems to the levels that we describe when we talk about XTP.
Gt: How are you seeing
requirements evolve within these industries?
PURDY: I think what we saw happening a year or two ago has definitely broadened, in terms of adoption, as well as deepened, in terms of requirements. A lot of these systems are mission-critical systems. They’re not science fair projects or academic projects; these are systems driving core infrastructure, particularly in financial institutions, in terms of being able to shrink overnight windows on risk calculations and things like that. We see a shift from what we used to think of as “exotic” use for these types of systems to -- at least in those types of environments -- mainstream use. I think a lot of it certainly has been driven by better understanding of the technology. Obviously, Gartner and Forrester and other analyst groups have been pretty instrumental in popularizing some of the notions that they witnessed in customer accounts of ours. Thus, these are things that have gone from being exotic to being pretty much mainstream -- at least within markets like telcos, financial institutions and high-scale e-commerce systems.
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