Interview: Ian Smith, UK head of Oracle, expects IT
directors to become evangelists for simple, cost-effective systems
that deliver computing on tap to the business.
The next 10 years in IT will be characterised by simplicity if
you believe Ian Smith. Oracle’s senior vice-president and managing
director for the UK, Ireland and South Africa thinks there will be
fewer suppliers, providing fewer products to IT directors who will
manage simple systems with fewer data repositories.
No one can accuse Oracle of giving out the kind of confused
messages which often characterise the output of other suppliers.
"One version of the truth," is Oracle’s oft-cited axiom, and that
is what you get from company representatives like Smith.
"The IT industry has been conning customers for a long time," he
said. "We’ve allowed customers to believe that IT is complex." He
sees a simpler future. The IT department of 2013 will have fewer
suppliers, with strategic liaisons making the relationship between
the supplier and the IT department one where each is more
"involved" in the other. Alongside this he sees the products
offered by suppliers merging into fewer, larger groups of
technologies.
"We, for example, have added more and more functions to the
database," he said. "We began with financial applications and now
have pre-integrated suites where the customer can pick and choose
modules. That is the way I see the industry going: fewer suppliers
offering broad, feature-rich suites. Smaller companies will not be
able to afford the research and development they will need to
survive."
IT supplied as a utility
And the simplicity born of consolidation among technologies and
suppliers will have its parallel in the role of the IT director,
believes Smith. The architecture of the future will be built around
a simple, single supplier set-up delivering information as smoothly
as a utility like electricity.
"If I were an IT director my ambition would be to deliver
applications on behalf of the business users in the way electricity
or gas is delivered," he said. "You have to be able to deliver
applications cheaply to support the processes of the business. The
challenge for the IT director in the coming years is to take all
his disparate, best-of-breed systems and multiple maintenance
contracts and figure out how to simplify it all, to make simple the
provision of knowledge that the business units need.
"It is a shame to see IT under-represented on the board. In the
1980s and 1990s the position of IT director was one to be proud of:
companies were not able to compete without making major IT
investments. I guess high-profile IT project failures have helped
to lose credibility and we have arrived at the situation of every
business unit owning information. Now we need to know what is going
on, to get customer information, to get company data, so we need to
string those systems together."
And how can that be achieved? Smith’s answer is pure on-message
Oracle. "Cheap internet computing and a simple infrastructure with
information kept in one place can give the access to information
the business needs. To get to this the IT director needs to become
an evangelist for low cost Intel-Linux infrastructure to bring the
business together using web services or pre-integrated suites of
applications," he said.
Oracle’s forward view
And that is another thing that the Oracle view of the future
includes: a hardware and operating system configuration based on
Intel processing and Linux, with Oracle on top, of course.
Smith is unabashed in his endorsement. "I am almost afraid to
tell customers of the cost savings they can make using racks of
Intel-Linux boxes. We can show ways to put together 16 CPUs in a
rack and save 75% of the cost of existing servers, and it is open,
robust and scalable," he said.
Collaboration versus security
If Smith’s vision is one of simplicity of supply of computing
within the enterprise, surely the business of the future will exist
in an environment where collaboration with business partners is
key. In this case how is security tackled in the Oracle future?
It is no surprise that the database is the key. Smith thinks
that methods of protecting information are well developed and that
how you hold it is the best safeguard. "I find the security
situation fascinating. When I go to a restaurant I do not follow
the waiter when he takes my credit card to make sure he does not
scan it twice, and my doctor keeps my records in a cabinet behind
the receptionist.
"The non-IT availability of information is very insecure and we
are happy about this if it is convenient and beneficial for us. If
we are doing business we need to be sure where the information is
sitting, and the way you do that is to minimise the places where it
is held.
"We need to agree with business partners that only one will hold
the data. I am convinced that encryption is good enough, but if
each organisation has 50 databases sitting in different places
doing different things it is more vulnerable. The fewer places
information is held the more secure it is," said Smith.
So Oracle’s vision of the IT department in the next decade is
one based on simplicity. But how will it get there? Standards will
be fought over as before, but Smith is convinced that past mistakes
will not be repeated in developing .net and J2EE.
"If you look back Microsoft can be seen to have achieved its
position while everyone else was distracted, arguing about open
standards. I am convinced that the IT industry will not let that
happen again and companies like Oracle and IBM will let them do it.
How can you have enough stimulation from one company alone? We
cannot have the enterprise exposed to a Windows situation - the
enterprise will die," said Smith.
Oracle’s plan is simple. The question is, how much traction will
it retain amid the onslaught of competitors and the real-world
demands of business IT?
CV: Ian Smith
- Recruited by Oracle in October 1999, having spent the preceding
five years with British Telecom
- Since joining the database specialist as managing director for
the UK and Ireland, he has also been given responsibility for South
Africa
- Originally recruited by BT in 1994 as director of customer
service, with responsibility for about 20 million residential
customers, in June 1998 he was appointed managing director of BT’s
Consumer Division
- In October of the same year, after a change in the
organisation, he became managing director of BT UK Customer
Service, responsible for the end-to-end delivery of customer
service to both residential and business customers
- In 1999, he was appointed vice-president of the Institute of
Customer Service, and two years later was invited to become the
institute’s president
- Before he joined the telecoms provider, Smith was director of
business partners at Digital Equipment Company, where he
accumulated more than 20 years’ experience in the IT industry in
both the UK and the US.