X
Business

Intel at Oracle OpenWorld: It's about time - and the cloud.

The phrase "Time is Money" is likely being muttered throughout Wall Street and Capitol Hill this week as Congress is being urged to quickly pass $700 billion legislation for an economy-saving financial bailout.Here at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini used the news of Wall Street's woes to illustrate how technology that moves in picoseconds (that's one-trillionth of a second) can save millions of dollars.
Written by Sam Diaz, Inactive

The phrase "Time is Money" is likely being muttered throughout Wall Street and Capitol Hill this week as Congress is being urged to quickly pass $700 billion legislation for an economy-saving financial bailout.

Here at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini used the news of Wall Street's woes to illustrate how technology that moves in picoseconds (that's one-trillionth of a second) can save millions of dollars. The example looked at a five-minute period on Sept. 15, the day that Wall Street reacted to a flood of bad economic news and the Dow was sent spiraling downward. According to the example, processing transactions on Intel's latest chip technology would have saved traders more than $33 million by pulling the trigger on those trades that much faster.

It was only one example that Otellini used as he followed the theme of time in his 50-minute keynote speech. His presentation looked at how enhanced chip technology in the medical sciences field allows doctors to quickly analyze CAT scans and potentially react to save lives. In the Internet business, it takes about three hours - compared to the previous 15 hours - for Yahoo to process 1.5 petabytes of data about where users clicked, allowing the company to adjust ad placements and services for its visitors several times a day, instead of a day later.

At the heart of the "speed enhancement" message is the recent introduction of Intel's six-core Dunnington chip. And, of course, because this is Oracle OpenWorld, all of this was meant to showcase - at least for the audience - how Oracle's software performs better using the fastest Intel chips. In the world of business, lost - or gained - time can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Amid Otellini's keynote address, there was also news: Intel and Oracle announced a collaborative effort to accelerate enterprise readiness of cloud computing to make it more efficient and secure. For some time, we've been chiming in about a migration to the cloud and, more specifically, how the enterprise has been reluctant, given some of the problems with the cloud. This is a good first step in helping to secure and stabilize the cloud's infrastructure.

As part of the announcement, the companies said they also will identify and drive standards to enable flexible deployment across private and public clouds. From the joint press release:

Enterprise customers are already running applications on shared infrastructure within their firewalls using Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) and Oracle Grid Computing technologies, including Oracle® Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Application Grid, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle VM. With this foundation, enterprises are now looking to create private clouds for their internal applications and to have the ability to extend them to public, multi-tenant clouds with the same level of security, flexibility and efficiency.

Other Oracle OpenWorld coverage:

Editorial standards