Agility that can lead disruption has been top of mind for businesses, as rapid cloud adoption has pushed the boundaries of innovation. The last year has accelerated the need for digital modernization, as low-code development, automation, and AI/ML provide new mechanisms for growth. Companies must now harness new digital tools to break data barriers and develop products faster, if they wish to lead the global disruption that’s resulting from this pivotal phase of cloud.

In the episode of our “Designed for Change” five-part podcast series, hosts Michael Hickins and Barb Darrow met with Chris Hollies, principal architect and CTO of Capgemini’s Oracle practice in the UK, to discuss how industries and customers are leveraging cloud to drive competitive differentiation.

The common denominator driving change for today’s industries is the cloud. These innovations are not only resetting customer expectations, but allowing every business to be more nimble, more responsive, and more personalized. Knowing your data means knowing your customers, and cloud computing has delivered an entirely new class of companies that are based entirely on innovative uses of data.

With digital modernization at the forefront of enterprise initiatives, it’s also shifting perceptions around different solutions. For instance, positive sentiment around Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has grown significantly in recent years, as advancements in cloud enable greater capabilities around SaaS. New forms of integration, extension, and configurability are shifting customer understandings of the maturity of SaaS, creating greater trust across the entire cloud portfolio. Now, sectors and industries can easily adopt a cloud ERP for greater efficiency while maintaining legacy investments.

However, this expanded solution inventory forces companies to explore creative applications of new technology.  Adding AI to a business strategy has accelerated with the cloud. Organizations are realizing that they must understand and leverage their data better, consequently driving greater interest around solutions for data management, data quality, data aggregation & harvesting, and modern data warehousing. AI has the power to simplify operations and drive decision-making, yet organizations are still struggling to fully leverage it to deliver enterprise-wide agility. Hollies uses the airline industry as an example, as he states,

“The really successful airlines will be those that haven’t just shifted their variable costs through temporary measures, but those that are able to do systemic restructuring using technology, using AI or RPA, for example, and really cut costs intelligently in a sustainable way so that, when the business does return, that they can ramp back up without their fixed cost base growing again.”

The maturing cloud ecosystem is giving rise to new trends across multi-cloud, low-code development, automation, and intelligence. For instance, Capgemini has utilized Oracle Integration Cloud and Visual Builder Cloud Service to deliver new mobile applications for companies already running E-Business Suite. By extending the core application, it has been possible to dramatically reduce effort and lead time in the requisition process. The first organization to roll out the application found that not only did they eliminate paper consumption but they also improved payment-on-time statistics by 15%.

Accelerating usage is inspiring new applications of cloud technology, as its value becomes familiarized across industries. While the global pandemic has sprouted global fear over market responsiveness and business agility, the cloud has become the hero, serving as a powerful engine for innovation. It’s up to business leaders to remain responsive to new trends, to unlock new possibilities for their organization and lead that digital disruption.

Listen to episode 5 today, our final episode of season 1 and catch up on episodes 1-4 in our Designed for Change series.

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