Tag Archives: Oracle China

Which Tech Companies Work for the Military? All

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Companies including Nokia, Dell, and Oracle are eager to apply decades of experience in civilian technology to the rapidly evolving battlefield. Drones, bodycams and digital sensors now stream real-time intelligence in volumes no human can digest. Military headquarters are crunching through that using artificial intelligence and pumping back to troops situational updates, tactical guidance and battle plans, constantly updated on computer screens and hand-held devices.  “We understand that the future weapon is data,” said Giorgi Tskhakaia, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation 

The first step is connectivity….Nokia is packaging 5G technology for ultra-secure use on battlefields and in national-security applications. It has developed backpacks with small 5G nodes and vehicle-based systems that can handle up to 1,000 users for a sort of tactical communications bubble. In 2025, it announced partnerships with military-equipment giants Lockheed Martin and Rheinmetall to integrate 5G communications into their systems.

Ericsson, the West’s only other maker of 5G networks and a producer of military radios going back to World War II, is also pushing into digital defense applications.

NATO is now working to adopt 5G as a military-communications standard across its 32 members. Alliance experts say the volume of military data is so great that 5G is best for transmission because the standard has at least 10 times the data capacity of earlier systems. It is also much more resilient against jamming

The second step is the extraction of data….Ukraine has spent three years developing AI systems to churn through all it collects… The Pentagon in 2017 launched a significant effort to adopt AI, Project Maven, tapping machine learning to digest mountains of data. Google’s role in the work sparked employee protests at the time…

Oracle, like many of its rivals, is no stranger to working with governments and militaries. The company began in 1977 out of a Central Intelligence Agency program—Project Oracle. But for decades it focused on corporate customers. Now, it and other cloud providers including Google, Amazon.com and IBM are applying to government and national-security work many lessons from their fierce commercial competition to move and process data fastest.

The final step in exploiting battlefield data is delivering it to fighters via gear that can handle combat conditions. Screens are proliferating on the battlefield, just as they did in offices and homes several decades ago, but warfare puts demands on equipment unlike any other environment…One Dell laptop is built to Pentagon standards for resistance to shocks, dust, sand, water and “explosive atmosphere,” meaning it won’t ignite flammable vapor. It can handle temperatures between minus 20 degrees and 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

Excerpt from Daniel Michaels, That 1990s Tech Brand? Its New Gig Is in Battlefield Data, WSJ, Sept. 9, 2025

Killing off Foreign Tech Firms – China

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E-commerce companies and banks in China are scrapping hardware and uninstalling software for mainframe servers made by American suppliers in favor of homegrown brands said to be safe, advanced and a lot less expensive.  Domestic rivals of these companies such as Huawei Technology Co. and Inspur Co. are winning contracts from state company and bank IT departments at an accelerating rate.

Some companies, such as e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, have been building internal computer networks with open-source software and commonly available hardware.  The movement dates to 2008, when Alibaba’s computer-network department director Wang Jian proposed cutting back on foreign suppliers and replacing their wares with equipment and technology developed almost entirely in-house. What Wang wanted to get rid of most was the so-called IOE system, an acronym for an IT network based on the names of three suppliers: IBM, whose servers are packaged with the Unix operating system; Oracle, which supplies database-management systems; and EMC, the maker of data-storage hardware. Wang dubbed his campaign the “De-IOE Movement.”

Wang decided to revamp Alibaba’s network by replacing its Unix-based servers with less expensive, X86-based PC servers running on the open-source Linux operating system. In such a system, several PCs with X86 microprocessors inside can be linked in a chain to function as a server, replacing a mainframe server. The e-commerce company also built a database management-system of its own with an open-source structure, and started storing data on an internal cloud-storage system…

De-IOE Movement milestones were reached in May 2013 when Alibaba pulled the plug on its last IBM server, and two months later when Alibaba’s advertising department abandoned its Oracle database. The rest of the company’s databases are scheduled to switch to a homegrown system from Oracle’s by 2015.

IT departments at companies and banks across the country are now following Alibaba’s example — and hitting their longtime American suppliers in the pocketbook.  The switch to servers made at home has been a slow process for Chinese banks. Ultimately, the banks’ IT experts have been making these decisions, although they’re being encouraged by the government to choose Chinese suppliers, according to a source close to the China Banking Regulatory Commission.  [But]

“Getting rid of IOE means that all of the software must be moved and made compatible to domestic server systems, which seems to be a mission impossible,” said the consultant…And replacement costs can be astronomical. “The basic technology networks for an IOE system and a ‘De-IOE’ system are totally different,” said another source a state bank. “De-IOE will lead to transforming personnel and management. It’s hard to estimate how high the costs will be.”  Ultimately, said the IT consultant, Chinese banks will only manage to kill off IOE systems if products made by Chinese suppliers can provide comparable security and capacity levels, and if the new hardware and software are compatible.

China pulling the plug on IBM, Oracle, others, MarketWatch June 26, 2014