Why Infrustructure-as-a-Service is critical to innovation | #OOW by Teryn O'Brien | Sep 21, 2016 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers organizations multiple benefits in the cloud, including dynamic scaling, a lower total cost of ownership and flexibility, among many other benefits. So, as more businesses search for IaaS solutions, Oracle has rounded out its product offerings in this area to include bare metal cloud servers and enhancements to its Oracle Cloud services. Don Johnson, VP of Engineering at Oracle, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld 2016 to talk about the importance of IaaS. The importance of IaaS for innovation There’s basically two strata of cloud, according to Johnson. The cloud platform and everything up above (apps, etc). “IaaS is a fundamental and foundational building block — and all of the characteristics that everything up above relies on or requires is basically enabled by infrastructure,” he said. A company either has infrastructure or they don’t. For Oracle, there is no option but to invest in the cloud, according to Johnson. Innovation requires it for success in the future market. “We’re a cloud platform company; this is a foundational piece,” he emphasized. “We’re pursuing this very progressively.” The importance of IaaS for enterprises “If you have … a large existing infrastructure and deployment — typically on premise — you have a lot of constraints,” explained Johnson. “And it’s difficult to actually move into this new environment and take advantage of all that it has to offer.” Oracle has identified a number of areas that it wanted to do better in its Cloud services: security, reliability, governance, performance, the ability to harness modern technologies and, most importantly, flexibility. “A core thing that we did … is the virtual network,” Johnson said. “And we made a fundamental choice that the way in which we’re gonna do the virtual network is to pull the virtualization into the network itself where we think it belongs.” RELATED: Art meets Big Data: How DreamWorks is utilizing analytics in modern animation | #SeizeTheData This means that Oracle is able to plug anything into a virtualized network for enterprises, giving customer bare metal compute. “That was key design criteria,” Johnson added. The design is much more friendly to any large enterprise or business that is “outside of the sweet spot of what an infrastructure like, let’s say, Amazon was originally designed for.”