Why single-vendor vertical stacks still matter in a Hybrid Cloud world

As hybrid cloud becomes the IT architecture of choice, it is tempting to think the days of the single-vendor vertical stack are numbered.

The Cisco 2022 Hybrid Cloud Adoption Trends Report cites 82% of IT leaders surveyed as adopting hybrid cloud. In this environment, where best of breed database, compute and storage resources can be assembled at the drop of a hat from a smorgasbord of cloud providers, it’s natural to question the value of these verticals.

Where everything is about speed, instant scalability, flexibility and usage-based pricing, why would you saddle yourself with an inflexible, capital intensive IT investment from a large vendor who will likely keep trying to shoehorn its products into every bit of your business?

Yet, while the big cloud vendors have undeniably taken a bite out of the market, it doesn’t look like the single-vendor vertical stack is going away anytime soon, and there are strong arguments why it still has an important role to play in a hybrid cloud world.

This blog examines those reasons. It looks at how Oracle, as a leading single-stack vendor, has reinvented itself as a cloud vendor to offer the best of breed speed, performance and capacity that today’s fast-moving businesses need, with the flexibility, integrations and interoperability that the hybrid cloud world demands.

Why the single-vendor vertical stack still matters                        

Many enterprises still rely on on-premise single-vendor vertical stacks to run their mission critical workloads. 

While a 2022 Gartner report forecasts that “more than half of enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to the cloud by 2025”, that leaves a significant amount invested on-premise, and it’s fair to assume that a significant proportion of that will be in mission critical applications, many of which will be running on single-vendor vertical stacks.

Some of this continued investment will be down to the inertia that tends to surround established enterprise platforms, where the path of least resistance is to keep buying the upgrades needed to stay in support.     

However, there may also be valid and compelling business reasons for retaining some on-premise vertical stack capability.

Mission critical workloads can have very high transaction per second (TPS) volumes, require very high uptime, resilience and speed to fix.

Once an enterprise has established a platform that delivers all of these, there is an inherent business risk in changing it.

The single vendor on-premise stack has relatively few moving parts. Migrating to a private or public cloud solution adds more elements – multiple vendors, network connections, security and management components – that inherently increase complexity, and therefore risk.  

When the survival of the business depends on a critical workload running perfectly, it’s a risk that some enterprises are understandably reluctant to take.

Single-vendor vertical stack solutions have a key role to play in delivering the level of application performance needed to meet the demands of a fast-paced, digital-led economy.

As well as reducing business risk, the simplicity of having a single vendor who owns and knows the code across database, infrastructure and applications enables a single-minded focus on continually improving performance across the stack.

Today’s vertical stack vendors need to be cloud vendors   

There is clearly no hard dependency between single-vendor vertical stack solutions and on-premise environments. They can run equally well and deliver the same benefits in a private or public cloud environment.

Equally clearly, traditional vertical stack providers need to transform themselves into effective cloud vendors if they are to remain competitive, and Oracle is one vendor that has done just that.

How Oracle has transformed itself into a leading cloud vendor   

Oracle’s pedigree as a major best of breed database vendor is widely recognised. They are also one of the few enterprise technology vendors who offer a full stack portfolio, from Database to applications and everything in between.

This pedigree comes with something of a reputation for seeking to “shoehorn” their solutions into customers as a catch-all answer to their challenges.   

This model does not sit comfortably in a hybrid cloud world, and Oracle has responded by re-inventing themselves as a major cloud vendor, while maintaining focus on their database offering, and continuing to bring differentiation to their cloud systems.

This transformation is reflected in Oracle solutions that enable customers to deliver a hybrid cloud architecture tuned to the needs of the business, without compromising Oracle’s best of breed capabilities.

From the OCI-Azure Interconnect that enables customers to build multi-cloud applications across OCI and Azure, to the Cloud@Customer (C@C) offering which allows customers to run Oracle Database and Exadata as a cloud service in their own datacentre, Oracle has opened up options giving customers the flexibility to tailor their hybrid cloud architecture to their precise business needs.

At the same time, Oracle has continued working to grow the performance of its best of breed database offering, maximising the advantage of having access to all the code to deliver the unparalleled performance advantages of running Oracle database on Oracle infrastructure.  As a result, the X9M, the 11^th generation of Oracle’s Exadata machine, is nothing short of ground-breaking for OLTP performance.

What next?

Logicalis UKI have extensive experience and capability as a trusted partner in making our customers’ hybrid cloud journeys a success, along with in-depth knowledge and expertise in the Oracle product set.

To continue the conversation and to find out more about what Logicalis UK have to offer, visit us at uki.logicalis.com or download our eBook here.

We also have a Fireside chat available to watch on-demand where Chris Batley, Oracle Head of Business Development at Logicalis UKI met with Lee Bonfield, UKI Alliances and Channel Leader at Oracle, to discuss all things Hybrid Cloud. Watch here!