CLOUD

Today, Oracle announces the results of its "Oracle Cloud Agility" study and revealed that businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) overestimate their agility. While a majority of businesses believe they are agile, Oracle's research highlights that many organizations cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test, and launch new applications, leaving them poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats. The study also found a lack of awareness among businesses around how technology, like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), can be used to help address these challenges. 

The Oracle Cloud Agility study surveyed 1,004 employees working for large enterprises in EMEA to understand business agility in the age of cloud. The results show that 62 percent consider their organization to be agile (i.e., able to adjust quickly to new business opportunities or to iterate new products and services quickly). 

Respondents are clear about the benefits of agility, with 78 percent stating that the ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch new business applications is either important or critically important to the success of their business. In particular, nearly one third of respondents (30 percent) believe the effective mobilization of applications and services is the most important factor for business success today when it comes to IT infrastructure.

The study also reveals that the competitiveness impact of agility is critically important to businesses. In fact, the ability of competitors to launch innovative customer services more rapidly was identified as the top threat by businesses (27 percent). Up to 58 percent of respondents state their businesses do not have an IT infrastructure capable of responding to these competitive threats. 

Significantly, the survey reveals the agility benefits delivered by PaaS are not being leveraged. In fact, according to the survey, 59 percent of EMEA businesses either cannot, or do not know if they can shift workloads between public, private, and hybrid clouds, and migrate on-premises applications to the cloud. Additionally, respondents indicate only 44 percent of businesses can develop, test, and deploy new business applications for use on mobile devices within six months, with this figure falling to just 27 percent within a one month timeframe. 

"There is something of an awareness gap emerging around how businesses can become more agile. While some companies already view themselves as agile, most of these are not yet able to realise the power of PaaS solutions to help them launch new services quickly. Other companies are just now starting their journey on the agility curve," said Tino Scholman, Vice-President, Oracle Cloud, EMEA. "If you want to become more innovative and experiment more often, then you have to make sure your Cost of Innovation goes down and goes down quickly. We want to help bridge this awareness gap by showing businesses how the right cloud platform solution can enable them to react almost immediately to market conditions and get well ahead of the competition."

The survey results bear out the assessment that businesses are not fully aware of how PaaS can increase operational agility. Only 34 percent of respondents state that they fully understand what PaaS is, while 20 percent admit that they do not understand it at all. For those that say they do understand PaaS, only 28 percent cite reduced timeframes for application development as a main benefit, far behind less strategic benefits such as savings on the cost of internal IT infrastructure (45 percent). 

"The best PaaS solutions, such as the Oracle Cloud Platform, deliver levels of agility not seen before. With simplified integration into existing IT infrastructures, the Oracle Cloud Platform can help businesses react immediately to customer demand through new services, while simultaneously driving innovation around internal business applications."