Rich Niemiec tells us why businesses are moving Oracle and open source databases to the cloud

When I look at the cloud, I think people are looking at many different types of data sources. And I think a lot of times people want multiple versions of their data warehouse. They're getting versions of data from other partners, maybe other vendors that are out there that they're sharing data with, and I think just managing all those copies of data is what's really making things difficult. I think when people move to the cloud, they have different versions of Oracle they're trying to keep in place. They have different versions of the product that is on top of Oracle, so the applications maybe aren't able to be migrated because they're not certified yet on Oracle. So just managing all these different versions of both Oracle, but also all these other versions of NoSQL databases and things like that. Well, I think you get these challenges with multiple versions of Oracle. So something like SharePlex-- you can actually use it as if you're using the same version of the database, same version even of the OS, even though they're all different versions, and you can move things between those. Also, if you have different databases-- you have a MySQL database, you have a Postgres database, you have a SQL Server database, you have even Kafka streaming data-- you can actually use SharePlex to manage those and move things between them as well. I don't think it's the biggest reason people move to SharePlex. At the end of the day, when you have a very large, enterprise-size problem, one of the issues is also price and cost. When you add up all these different data sources you're trying to manage, people have to look at that cost, and I think Quest and SharePlex puts a price that's usually less than half the competitors out there. But when you look at open source, I can tell you right now the first thing people look at is price. So Quest offers very competitive prices, usually less than half of competitors', but they also support that open-source community. You could do things from Postgres to MySQL. You could use things like Kafka, and it supports those of migrating databases. And it also takes them to the bigger databases if needed, but a lot of times, people don't want to pay for that big, expensive vendor for all the databases they have, so some of their databases are open-source. And SharePlex is a way to migrate data between all those data sources.