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Here's Why Cloud Adoption Is About To Shift Into High Gear

Oracle

Given all the media coverage in recent years, it would be reasonable to assume that cloud computing already dominates the IT landscape. In reality, however, tech analysts pin the number of IT workloads in the cloud at only 5 or 6%.

Where are those other 95%?” asks Steve Daheb, executive vice president of cloud strategy at Oracle. His answer? Companies have been waiting for a cloud that better fits how their business actually runs.

“To this point, the cloud has been more about handling net-new workloads, and less about providing a migration path for what enterprises run today,” said Daheb, in a recent talk at the Oracle OpenWorld 2016 conference in San Francisco, California. It’s those enterprise-scale, mission-critical, legacy workloads—the majority of which run on Oracle products today—that put Oracle in “the best position of any cloud provider to move customers to cloud,” he said.

Daheb suggested, along with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, that the move to the cloud is inevitable. Beyond simply shifting to more efficient and agile computing infrastructure, the cloud “changes how businesses run and people work, creating new categories of business and disrupting existing ones,” said Daheb. The challenge for business thus far has been finding a path to the cloud that meets their needs while preserving their existing investments.

Creating that path has been a huge undertaking for Oracle, said Daheb, noting that it takes time to build a cloud platform good enough, broad enough, and integrated enough to entice those workloads to the cloud. “Could we have put something in the market years ago? We could have,” he said. “But instead we did the hard work of moving our entire platform layer to the cloud.” In June 2014, Oracle launched its initial suite of 28 integrated platform services on Oracle Cloud, including database as a service, developer services, mobile services, business intelligence, and IT management. Since then that list has grown to more than 40 services, with additions such as cloud services to support the Internet of Things and identity management.

The Platform Is the Path

Daheb, however, uses the word “platform” to refer to more than just platform as a service (PaaS). Oracle’s broader cloud platform encompasses its entire cloud portfolio of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services. “Our strength at every cloud layer results in a solution that not only spans each of those layers but connects them in unprecedented ways,” Daheb said.

Having integrated services at all three cloud layers lets customers find the path to cloud that’s right for them. “Not every cloud journey is the same,” he said. “I might start with a SaaS application and decide to use PaaS services to extend the app or integrate it with my back-end data, or connect it to another cloud service. I might start with PaaS services for development and testing, and then move the app to production with all the capacity it needs, and then quickly add analytics. I might start with hardware consolidation and attach some SaaS services. There’s no cookie-cutter way to do it.”

Daheb cited examples, such as communications service provider Avaya, which wanted to better serve its 20,000 worldwide partners by moving its sales processes to Oracle Cloud and later adding Oracle Marketing Cloud. It then integrated and extended both, using Oracle’s PaaS services for Java development and integration—vastly improving customer engagement while lowering ongoing costs by 30%. Likewise, Pandora selected Oracle ERP Cloud to modernize the finance function of its online music streaming service. The company then added enterprise performance management capabilities in Oracle Cloud to simplify access and integrate real-time information.

“When you offer a fully integrated stack of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, you can address these different starting points,” said Daheb. “You enable the journey in the way that people want to take it.”

Cloud as the Great Equalizer

Oracle Cloud is also introducing Oracle’s enterprise software to a new class of customer: small- and medium-size businesses and departments that might not have considered Oracle in the past. “Cloud is that great equalizer,” said Daheb, “Sixty percent of our SaaS customers weren’t Oracle customers before they bought our cloud,” he said, quoting a favorite stat of Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd.

The reason for this momentum is that customers aren’t just getting a best-in-class business application for a single use, such as HR, CRM, or ERP, said Daheb. Instead, they’re getting a platform that lets them quickly integrate across disciplines. “Now they can focus on the whole customer experience they’re providing across the company,” said Daheb. This, he notes, is vastly different than what many companies are experiencing. “When you look at how some customers are trying to solve this today, it’s really all over the place,” he said. “They might be using Salesforce, Marketo, Workday, Tableau, Adobe, SAP, and so on, and they’re asking themselves, ‘Wasn’t cloud supposed to be easy?’ Seems like they are running head-first into the same problems cloud was meant to solve.”

Whether it’s companies looking for more than just a one-off cloud app, or large enterprises with complex migrations that happen over time, Oracle’s platform is poised to take on that work. “That’s the 95% of workloads that have been waiting for a true enterprise platform to move to cloud,” said Daheb.