Oracle Cloud Platform a kind of innovation magic
Says Ahsan Javed, country managing director for Oracle Pakistan and South Asia Growth Economies
Oracle provides complete cloud solutions which help companies drive innovation and business transformation. Ahsan Javed, country managing director for Oracle Pakistan and South Asia Growth Economies, talked with The Independent about the launching on the latest Oracle Cloud Platform offering.
Tell about this launch?
In a recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, roughly half of the 750 business leaders said just that IT is too slow.
So what can organisations do? The study highlights that in todays digital age, business agility depends on responsive IT. To achieve this responsiveness and flexibility, the study suggests that organisations need to: increase the speed with which they innovate around new digital initiatives; find new products and ways of working; and simplify IT operations, whilst at the same time orchestrating services from a variety of providers so the internal team can focus on how their business exploits technology, homegrown or not.
This is why we believe that this launch of the next phase of our Oracle Cloud Platform is going to be so important to our customers. We are introducing the next wave of Oracle Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that will help companies drive innovation and business transformation. Oracle Cloud Platform delivers the broadest and deepest portfolio unmatched in the market. We are now extending the Oracle Cloud Platform to incorporate cloud services around Big Data, Mobile, Integration, Process and Exadata.
Can you help to understand PaaS?
PaaS enables organisations to consolidate existing applications on a shared, common cloud architecture, as well as quickly develop and deploy new applications that leverage the shared services provided by the platform. PaaS lets organisations achieve the fastest time to market with the lowest cost of ownership and management.
Why are these services important to customers?
I would say that their importance fits across a couple of key areas:
Increased agility - many enterprises are still struggling to achieve the agility thats so critical to their success. Developing and testing new applications and setting up the IT systems to support that can take weeks or even months. As a result, innovation slows , while the cost of supporting that innovation continues to rise.
Lower costs - by using PaaS to develop and deploy applications, they can eliminate the cost and complexity of managing the underlying application platforms. In fact, businesses that use PaaS have reported operational savings of up to 50 percent compared to using siloed technology stacks.
What makes your PaaS solution different? Are all PaaS solutions/providers equal?
Oracle is the only company with an integrated suite of
services at all levels of the
cloud: Platform as a Service, as well as Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Data as a Service. All our Cloud solutions are built on flexibility, offering customers complete choice of cloud deployment models - public, private and hybrid - to suit specific business challenges; and the ability to quickly and easily move between them.
Our PaaS offering is built on a foundation of the worlds #1 database and application server technology. Our PaaS offers unique cloud tooling and automation that is unparalleled in the industry, which not only reduces the cost and complexity of deploying and managing enterprise applications, but it also enables businesses to innovate faster and focus resources on other strategic initiatives.
Now, with the performance, scale and reliability of Engineered Systems underpinning our PaaS offerings, Oracle has raised the bar with respect to supporting mission-critical applications in the cloud.
On top of that Oracle is the only provider that has social capabilities fully integrated into every app at the platform level, bringing social into everything. It is the same for analytic capabilities; built in. And the big watch word: security. Yes, you guessed it. Built in!
So our aim with PaaS, as well as with SaaS and IaaS is to have the most complete and best suite available, with unprecedented levels of choice, flexibility and integration.
No wonder some of the biggest and best-known companies in the world are turning to the Oracle Cloud, and many are choosing us for all levels of the cloud stack.
What impact do you expect the availability of PaaS to have on the market?
PaaS technology is a game changer and it is going to be a fascinating area to watch. Already, the customer interest and growth rates we are seeing in this area are unprecedented. PaaS really does enable a company to do more with less, to simplify IT and remove complexity. We are seeing time and again, it accelerating time to value and enabling innovation and transformation.
One of the main reasons is that PaaS gives companies the ability to try out ideas, quickly, easily and very cost effectively, through a test-dev capability in the cloud. It enables them to set up in literally an hour, what used to take weeks, if not months to do. Previously, users had to procure the hardware, set it up, install everything needed, and then either code a custom application or deploy a prebuilt application. Now you just provision an environment. Imagine, an hour!
This allows companies to encourage employees to innovate, explore, and experiment with new approaches with the enthusiasm and confidence of entrepreneurs.
This fail fast mentality is important. In the HBR study, the report clearly showed a correlation between an organizations cloud maturity and the health of its growth initiatives. The upshot? Those companies with a strategic enterprise approach to the cloud are more likely to expand, innovate and transform.
I prefer to echo one of my colleagues, Mike Lehmann, Oracles vice president of product management, who said, I dont want to say its magic, but to some degree thats whats happening.
