Rick Schiller talks about SharePlex for cloud migration

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Oracle OpenWorld 2019. I'm John Pocknell with Quest product marketing. I'm joined here by Rick Schiller, who is the product manager for SharePlex. So Rick, what have you seen and heard so far at your time here about what customers are trying to do, what challenges they have, and where SharePlex is a solution? Well, clearly, movement to the cloud is something that's been-- that's not a new trend. But it's something that continues to happen. And we just had a presentation, as a matter of fact, by a major travel services provider, who was just talking about how they use SharePlex to reduce their risk and downtime. It was a really pretty fascinating presentation on how they were using it. They're using it with the active-active configurations in such a way that they could throttle and move their traffic between the cloud system and the on-premises system, such that it allowed them really to observe how the system was working, make sure that it was working OK, fell back to the on-premises system if they needed to, gradually ramp up traffic on the cloud instance of things, the full cloud application stack. And it was a pretty fascinating presentation by them. It makes all of us on the SharePlex team pretty proud when we see how people are able to practically implement this technology in ways that makes their businesses successful. Sounds really cool. So they were using two systems. So how were they able to keep the two systems in sync with one another? Yeah. So SharePlex, at the core, is a database replication product. We're capturing changes through the Oracle redo log and sending it through a variety of systems to populate the other database. That's sort of the simplest use case. But in their case, they had to run an active-active configuration. So they could basically write to the on-premises system, write to the cloud-based system that used conflict resolution schemes to help them in those cases where data may change before it could actually hit. So the changes happened in a shorter period of time than the actual latency to get those changes moved over. So the conflict resolution was a key part of that, as well as using-- they set up some ways to move their traffic as it came into the systems, direct it between the cloud application or the on-premises one. Right. Right. So while we're on the subject of cloud, I understand you guys did a survey recently about cloud service providers. What was the outcome of that survey? Yeah. So we did. We ran a survey with our user base. So, you know, this is not the Oracle user base as a whole. This is our user base. And clearly, AWS was the vendor of choice for our users. We did happen to also ask them what they were planning to do in two years. What was their expectation? And we did see some additional interest in Oracle Cloud on that. So we did see Oracle Cloud. At least, people's perception was that they thought they might be using more Oracle Cloud in the next several years. But by far and away, AWS was the leader. And are you seeing more demand for infrastructure as a service versus database as a service in the cloud environment? Or would you say it's about equal? No, I haven't seen any real trend. I mean, customers have specific reasons for choosing which particular direction they go. So choosing EC2-- so this travel services provider, they talked about, do we want to go to EC2? Or do we want to go to RDS? And for them, they couldn't go to RDS because they had a lot of third-party services that they use-- monitoring tools and scripts and other things that weren't going to be able to run on RDS. So for them, they needed to go to EC2. But for other customers that don't necessarily have that, then I have seen them be keen to go to RDS. So as always in these technology discussions, it's an "it depends." What exactly are you trying to accomplish? All right. Great. Well, thanks very much, Rick. That's a really interesting insight into what's going on in the world of SharePlex. If you want to learn more about SharePlex, go to www.Quest.com/SharePlex. Thank you for listening. Thank you.