Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power.
Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud.
Cloud computing is more than just consuming an application as a service, and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud comes from enabling your business to be more agile in the market place, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn’t seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw — you just can’t bring it all together without losing something.
Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on-premise applications. This is where a common platform built on open standards is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.)
Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy — regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems, while maintaining the ability to deliver enterprise, real-time reporting executives demand today. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience and reports without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain.
Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way.
In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds — not only is there rich functionality that spans functional pillars like CRM, HCM and ERP, but, social, mobile, and business intelligence are already embedded where it makes the most sense across a complete business process. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.
