by Bob Evans
September 2016
In a world where the notion of an app for personalized DNA mapping is not so far-fetched, where 3-D printers the size of tractor-trailers pump out materials for building an entire home in 24 hours, where the world’s largest industrial company runs TV ads celebrating its hiring of world-class coders, and where energy companies now sell services that help their customers buy less energy from them, the big question we have to ask ourselves is this: Am I part of the revolution, or am I embracing and propping up the status quo?
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If there’s any middle ground between those extremes of joyfully creating the future or stubbornly preserving the past, that middle ground is disappearing—quickly. But the good news is that the technology enabling the sweeping end-to-end business transformations listed above is available to everyone. And more and more CIOs and other visionary business leaders are shifting the conversation from “Where can I do some low-risk cloud trials?” to “How can the cloud help us drive end-to-end business value and accelerate customer-centric innovation?”
Cloud computing—infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and data as a service—has demonstrated its ability to help solve a number of business problems. But the overriding benefit winning the hearts and minds of CIOs is that the cloud is freeing them from the tyranny of the 80/20 IT budget trap, in which 80 percent of their precious IT spending was sucked up by low-value and no-value integration, maintenance, and legacy support, leaving only 20 percent for innovation.
And those numbers tell the most important story: In today’s tumultuous business world, where disruption is everywhere and customers are calling the shots, companies that cannot aggressively fund customer-centric business innovation will die. For the first time in a generation, CIOs have a viable alternative to that 80/20 budget tyranny, because cloud computing lets them push more and more “keep the lights on” costs over to cloud providers, allowing those CIOs to redeploy huge chunks of their budgets toward innovating and growing revenue for their companies.
But the beauty of end-to-end enterprise cloud computing is that it does much more than transform the economics of IT. It also accelerates the pace of innovation because updates happen quarterly rather than every five years. It shortens the time to value because businesses don’t have to own and manage sprawling IT factories and spend millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours splicing together disparate piece-parts that were never intended to work together. And the cloud lets businesses plug into our modern mobile-social world so that those companies can move at the speed of their customers.
In today’s tumultuous business world, where disruption is everywhere and customers are calling the shots, companies that cannot aggressively fund customer-centric business innovation will die.”
At the same time, software-as-a-service systems are revolutionizing the employer-employee relationship by helping companies identify, engage with, recruit, and retain world-class talent; give employees more of a voice in building skills, relationships, and careers; and quickly identify the high-potential leaders of tomorrow.
Then there are the cloud-driven transformations taking place in finance, allowing CFOs to deploy resources more quickly, intelligently, and profitably; in the supply chain, helping companies get new products to market more quickly; and across a growing number of vertical-industry applications, where the cloud brings all of these competitive advantages to bear in high-change, high-touch fields such as retail, hospitality, healthcare, financial services, and communications.
In this special issue of Profit, several top Oracle executives—including CEO Mark Hurd and President of Product Development Thomas Kurian—share their insights on how the cloud is enabling and accelerating business transformations in companies large and small in every industry and on every continent.
We hope you find that this digital format allows you to discover the ideas you need in the formats you want—text, video, links to related content, and more. And we hope those ideas will help you not just keep up with but instead get ahead of the remarkable changes taking place in today’s business world.
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