Recent Posts by Brian Bowman

No company goes to the cloud alone. Cloud transformation is not a journey undertaken solely for the company. It is a taken for and with the customer. This can get lost in the midst of the cloud transition. Most of the technology change and organizational change required occurs under the surface for the software provider undergoing the transformation. Most of this work should be transparent to customers, who ultimately benefit and who will be focused on the destination, not how...

The hardest thing to change is people. Cloud is a big change for an organization’s technology, but often a bigger change for its culture and its workforce. This real question for leadership is how to deal with this change. Keeping the workforce exactly the same may be appealing. But as our entries in this series have demonstrated, what works for product-based software doesn’t work for software as a service. Yet hiring an entirely new workforce as just a problematic,...

The first phase of a migration is when things really get rolling. What was happening in slow, tentative steps now is revealed to the world and begin to gather steam. Pilots are complete, customers take notice, analysts write about the ongoing cloud transformation, and executives hold their breath while they wait to see whether everything is going to go smoothly. It is a heady moment. Indeed, many people get swept up in the moment, seeing it as planting the first flag on the...

Creating the migration inventory is a pivotal moment where the organization takes stock of the environments that it needs to move to the cloud, and the information that it needs about those environments. This can be a more complex undertaking that it sounds. Oracle is a company that has been built from the acquisition, evolution, and integration of multiple leading software products. This is especially true for the Oracle industry GBUs, which cross many different product sets....

There are three ways to get to the cloud. If you read a technology journal or cloud marketing material, you’ll hear about the “easy” cloud migration that happens at the push of a button. Companies that take this as truth are likely to run into the “hard” cloud migration, where timelines slip, costs rise, and goals are scaled back – another favorite story of the technology journals – offering a cautionary tale to companies that would leap headfirst into this new technology....

At Oracle, we are reinventing the technologies that are the foundation of our enterprise. Over a two-year span, one group in Oracle, a portfolio of industry enterprise applications serving eight separate industries, known collectively as the Global Business Units (GBUs), will close 80 data centers across the globe, consolidating our IT infrastructure within a single, unified vision and architecture - Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI is a second-generation cloud computing...