I recently had the pleasure of visiting Dallas to be the guest of honor at Keste’s Exalogic Solution Center. This marked a special occasion for us – Keste is the first North American partner to setup a solution center for Exalogic. This marks an important juncture in the adoption of Exalogic: an ecosystem of Systems Integrators and Hosting companies are steadily ramping up Exalogic competencies to enable Oracle customers to adopt Exalogic (and Exadata for that matter). At the event, I got the opportunity to meet with Oracle customers across a range of industries – from transportation to healthcare to financial services. The audience at the event were all eager to understand how they could leverage Oracle’s Engineered Systems (Exalogic and Exadata) to improve application performance and throughput with the lowest TCO. I am quite confident they walked away with a much better idea of how they could leverage these technologies next time they do a software project with Oracle middleware or Oracle Applications, when they upgrade their existing custom or packaged Oracle Applications, or when they do a hardware refresh.
While at Keste for the ceremonies for the Opening of the Solution Center, I spent some time with Vince Casarez, a colleague for many years, and a name with which most people that have been involved with Oracle Middleware during the last 10+ years are very familiar. Vince is now SVP of technology at Keste. He talked me through how he explains the optimizations in Exalogic and Exadata in layman terms.
I am quite (and intimately) familiar with the results that our customers and prospects have been achieving with Exadata and Exalogic. For example, an online banking system for which response times have been improved by 10x and throughput increased by 3x, or a large logistics customer for whom response times were reduced by 4x and throughput by 3.8x, or a large Chinese telco for whom Exalogic + Exadata are delivering 12x to 22x performance improvements. However, when customers ask HOW these results are being achieved, I talk about the proprietary chipset we have in our I/O fabric, the SDP optimizations that we have implemented for connecting Exalogic to Exadata, the parallel muxer in WebLogic, and the threading architecture for WebLogic on Exalogic. While all of these technical capabilities surely contribute to the performance and throughput gains customers are seeing with Exalogic, they are not necessarily easy to explain.
Vince had a really simple way of explaining how Exalogic and Exadata manage to deliver performance breakthroughs. I won’t spoil the story for you: go and listen to his video on youtube.
You may be asking who is Keste? Keste is a systems integrator focused on Oracle technologies in High Tech and Industrial Manufacturing, Telecom, Oil and Gas, and Healthcare verticals, with a particular emphasis on Fusion Middleware (WebCenter, ADF, SOA, etc) and Oracle Applications such as E-Business Suite and Siebel. Keste has built its reputation on being at the leading edge of Oracle and Industry breakthroughs such as designing complex order to cash solutions for mass customization, adopting ADF as a core framework standard long before it was a standard, and appears to be continuing this thirst for being first in new technologies with the purchase of their own Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine and the release of their Cloud-based engineered solutions practice which is largely powered by Oracle Exalogic and Exadata. Keste first showed up on Oracle’s radar with their telco solution which they designed and built using nearly every module in the FMW suite and a highly complex transaction portal powered by Oracle E-Business Suite Configurator, built largely on Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).
So what is driving systems integrators and solution providers such as Keste to invest in Exalogic and Exadata? Simply put Oracle partners are seeing the tremendous opportunity to help Oracle customers leverage Oracle’s Engineered Systems such as Exalogic and Exadata to recreate the way their do IT, to deliver applications that run faster, that achieve better throughput and the lowest cost per transaction.
Keste is the 13th partner owned and operated Exa Center of Excellence (CoE) location and the 1st partner in the USA to showcase the Exastack combination of Exalogic and Exadata in their new, state of the art data center located in Dallas, TX. Exa CoE facilities can consistently be leveraged by customers and Oracle’s sales force alike to accelerate sales, incubate new opportunities and showcase partner developed solutions offerings. The Solution Center and Exalogic demo ground in Dallas are open and available for demos, customer workshops, and POCs (or to just help close) for both customers and Oracle (!). Keste anticipates the Solution Center will be a fantastic resource for Oracle customers and prospects. To arrange tours or book the center, please contact Neil Conklin at 214 778-2124 (neil.conklin@keste.com).
