Oracle “Code” initiative is for global cloud-native developer community and contributions to Open Source: Amit Zavery

Sangram Aglave from BW BusinessWorld met Amit Zavery at the Oracle’s mega developer event, Oracle Code 2017 held at New Delhi on 10th May 2017.

Amit Zavery is Oracle’s senior VP for cloud platform and middleware products. He is responsible for product development, product strategy, roadmap, and go-to-market initiatives for Oracle Cloud Platform and the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family. Excerpts from an interview: 

BW: What is the objective of Oracle Code events?

Amit Zavery:  The Oracle Code brings together technical experts, industry leaders, and other developers in keynotes, sessions, and hands-on labs for developers that attend the Code event. 

This is a unique opportunity to experience cloud development in the Code Lounge with workshops and other live, interactive experiences and demos. The event was flagged off on March 1st, 2017, and has already happened in several locations across North America, Europe and Japan.

BW: Can you explain Oracle’s cloud platform strategy?

Amit Zavery: Oracle has been investing in its cloud platform from more than a decade now. Our goal is to provide a complete, open, integrated and secure cloud platform.

The strategy is developer/customer focused and seeks to enable any developer to build and deploy applications, integrate and extend those applications, be able to collaborate, share the content created within the cloud platform, and subsequently be able to visualize and analyze that content, and manage and secure the cloud platform. 

Oracle provides end to end functionality from bare metal to middleware platform and products to industry specific applications. Oracle is live with this most comprehensive cloud stack with about 15,000 customers across the globe today using this. 

Oracle has also made available the same technology that powers its public cloud to the customers that want to run their cloud behind their firewall. This ensures that the stack is the same and it comes with benefits realized by customers. 

For e.g., there is no code rewrite when developers choose to move their workloads from and between the public cloud to systems behind their firewall.

BW: How does Oracle plan to bring ISV to its cloud platform? 

Amit Zavery: We are doing many things for developers to be excited about what we can offer them. We make sure that our cloud provides support for multiple technologies and application runtimes. This is not just limited to Java, but we provide other options like Ruby, node.js, GO. 

Oracle Cloud also provides containerization and subsequent workflows using latest technologies like Kubernetes. On top of that we have also provided tools for API lifecycle management so that developers can come up with API first kind of designs. 

Oracle is focused on making the developers life easy, and provide a simple way of building applications, provide a low-code development platform that allow developers to visualize the design, and being able to develop applications without having to write a lot of code. 

BW: What is the difference between OTN  and Oracle Code?

Amit Zavery: Oracle Technology Network (OTN) is Oracle product focused whereas Oracle Code is open source and cloud native developer focused. Like OTN, Oracle code also has a portal and can be accessed at https://developer.oracle.com/code

BW: What is the future of Java?

Amit Zavery: Java is the largest developer community. The community keeps on growing. Oracle makes sure that we provide latest updates and standard technologies to the Java community, and its collaboration with a lot of other vendors who also contribute towards enhancing and extending Java.

Developers could have other preferences and we are doing our best to support those technologies with Java.

BW: What is the commitment to the Open Source community at Oracle?

Amit Zavery: Oracle sometimes does not get enough credit for their contributions to Open source community or that we don’t do a good job of marketing what we are doing and have done. Java itself is one of the largest open source communities out there. 

Oracle makes that sure that continues and Java remains a robust and rapidly growing community. MySQL is the database of choice when it comes to open source databases and has maximum deployments inside production systems across the globe. 

Oracle is investing in MySQL as well to make that product better. Oracle runs a lot of open source in its own cloud platform and we are constantly improving that code base since our cloud runs on it. 

Oracle understands that customers might choose open source technologies and we continue to support Open source technologies on our cloud platform.