This post was contributed by Oracle’s Director of Content Strategy, Jeff Erickson (jeffrey.x.erickson@oracle.com)
For people steeped in the nitty-gritty operations of enterprise technology, 90 percent of which still resides on company-owned data centers, “moving to cloud” sounds like a journey for another day. They aren’t immune to the promises, but they’re busy keeping their business’s current set of applications running.
“That’s important work that needs to keep getting done,” said Oracle Senior Vice President Steve Daheb in an address to a gathering of independent user groups dedicated to Oracle technologies and business applications. “So the question becomes, how do you take advantage of cloud in a way that makes sense to the way you work right now, today?”
Daheb’s audience members spend their work days manning the technology that tracks shipping containers, cuts government checks, makes sure medical trials proceed accurately, and ensures the ATM recognizes your pin number—among untold other complex processes that keep a modern economy humming.
“We have to go beyond just ‘move to the cloud,’” said Daheb. “We’re all running our businesses on infrastructures that we built over years,” Daheb said, and cloud solutions need to complement the investments businesses have made in those infrastructures. He outlined three ways Oracle Cloud will help them do just that.
1. A Unified Suite of Business Applications
One way to start taking advantage of cloud is to find a line of business within your company that’s ready to upgrade to modern digital processes. Only Oracle offers a full suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications spanning every business category, said Daheb, “from supply chain to ERP, to the modern HR tools we use to run our business, to marketing sales and service.”
The applications “are part of a unified suite with a common set of tools to integrate data, business intelligence, and business processes,” he said. “Each can be deployed as a complete business application on its own, or it can be deployed as a module to complement another business application. And they can be connected back to what we have on premises or to other clouds.”
And with Oracle’s data-as-a-service (DaaS) offering, which combines a wealth of data about businesses and consumers across channels and devices, Oracle SaaS customers can get much more insight in terms of what people will best respond to and ultimately give them the best experience with your business, Daheb said: “We can understand from a customer perspective what they buy, what OSs they are running based on what smart phones and what laptops they’re using. Are they millennials? Are they college graduates? Are they parents?”
2. A Platform for Adding Business Value
Underpinning Oracle’s SaaS applications is a layer of platform technology for building or extending those applications or migrating on-premises applications to the cloud. “It’s about how do we extend and bridge and connect all applications, Oracle as well non-Oracle, SaaS applications as well as on-prem applications, and other clouds,” said Daheb. “How do we integrate and simplify that for everybody?”
At the end of the day, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is about doing things like reducing the time it takes to provision a database, said Daheb. “It’s about spinning up an environment for agile application development where you develop on the cloud and deploy in production on premises. It’s about turning it on when you need it and turning it off when you don’t.”
Oracle’s PaaS provides the tools that help you manage your environment, your application performance, the ongoing experience, and the security, said Daheb—and beyond that, it “will help you ingest data from different sources and prepare, discover, and apply decision science and machine learning for new and better insights for your business.”
3. Infrastructure Built for the Enterprise
Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions, including compute, storage, and networking services, as well as Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services, combine the elasticity and utility of public cloud with the control, security, and predictability that technologists are accustomed to with their on-premises deployments, said Daheb.
Oracle’s IaaS layer “wasn’t something that was created for some other purpose or for commodity services or for searching or for ecommerce; we built it with you in mind,” Daheb told his audience. “Ultimately it’s a high-performance, high-availability, and cost-effective infrastructure service that gives you the control you’re used to.”
Cloud: Just Another Technology Transition
The transition to cloud computing “is simply an extension of our longstanding relationship with our IT counterparts, with developers, and with the different lines of business,” said Daheb. “We’ve built a cloud solution that’s open and secure, and that ultimately gives you power over how to make use of it. It’s available to you at every layer of the tech stack. All those layers are integrated together and based on the same foundational application, platform, and infrastructure you use on premises every day.”
For more than four decades “we’ve worked together on every single major technology transition, from mainframe, to client/server, to the rise of the internet, to mobile, to cloud, to whatever comes next,” he told the tech veterans. “Because, there’s always something next, right?”
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