Oracle customers are looking for ways to “divest themselves of tech responsibilities,” said Mike Palmeter, Senior Director of Product Engineering at Oracle.  They want to go up the stack instead of focusing their efforts on low-level infrastructure in order to differentiate, he explained. Oracle is supporting their customers’ efforts by providing engineered systems fine-tuned to business needs.

“Customers’ concerns are changing,” Palmeter detailed, noting they’re increasingly concentrated on “data models, implementing business logic, and understanding their users, rather than figuring out how to use a cluster or build large-scale data management services.” More than ever, it appears that customers are willing to hand over the more technical reins to Oracle.

According to Palmeter, this shift in customer preferences led Oracle to change their own approach. The multinational tech company honed in on solving engineering challenges, designing microprocessors, and refining database and middleware. It’s a question of building “the right tool for the job,”Palmeter said, explaining that if customers are “running infrastructure at a large scale, they need a reliable platform, but they don’t need to care about which chip is underneath.” When all the components are right, customers can approach an Oracle platform like a turnkey system: secure, stable, and accessible.

That security, said Palmeter, is key. It’s an area of primary concentration for Oracle. In a world where the data center is “inside out” on the cloud, Palmeter says that Solaris and Spark’s long standing tradition of security “plays a big role in the success of supercluster.” In fact, Palmeter highlighted how pleased he is with Solaris. Beyond its security benefits, Palmeter said that “Solaris has unique performance optimization capabilities that enable Oracle to optimize for high-value workloads.”

Oracle, Palmeter explained, is ushering in a new era, one in which an operating system is no longer thought of as “running on the server” but as “something that runs the datacenter.” Oracle customers, he said, will have access to infrastructure when necessary, but will be shielded from the underlying complexity.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to follow us on Twitter for more from Oracle’s Next Generation Engineered Systems Launch Event.