SL progressive in adoption of cloud technology - Oracle

Oracle is the fastest growing public cloud company at scale apart from being the most complete cloud company. Oracle cloud solutions achieved 60% growth in the 2017 fiscal year to $ 4.6 billion with SaaS segment growing by 70%. Oracle has over 25,000 customers globally who are using a variety of cloud applications via four offerings - Database as a Service (Daas), Software as a Services (SaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Oracle’s Regional Director South Asia Growth Economies Chandita Samaranayake

Oracle’s Regional Director South Asia Growth Economies Chandita Samaranayake revealed last week Sri Lanka is one of the high adopters of cloud technology in Southeast Asia.

“Sri Lanka is an important country in Asia Pacific for Oracle. When it comes to adopting cloud technology Sri Lanka is not a small market but a progressive and a growing one as firms are increasingly realising benefits of  cloud technology,” said Samaranayake, who is directly responsible for overall Oracle applications business for Sri Lanka, Maldives, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

Reinforcing Oracle’s commitment to the growing Sri Lanka market, Samaranayake said the global giant is expanding marketing and technical support. 

Last week Oracle showcased three out of a growing list of Sri Lankan companies which are harnessing its Cloud solutions as part of their digital transformation journey. 

According to Samaranayake, Oracle is the fastest growing public cloud company at scale apart from being the second largest software company in the world with over $ 40 billion in revenue and annual spend of $ 5 billion on Research and Development. 

“Oracle cloud solutions achieved 60% growth in the 2017 fiscal year to $ 4.6 billion with SaaS segment growing by 70%,” he added. 

Being what he described as the “most complete cloud company” to date, Oracle has over 25,000 customers globally who are using a variety of cloud applications via four offerings - Database as a Service (Daas), Software as a Services (SaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). 

“For example we have five billion customer profiles with us, we have one billion business IDs and $ 3 trillion purchase data,” he said, explaining the DaaS prowess of Oracle. With regard to IaaS, Oracle offering is lowest in terms of cost and highest in terms of performance. 

All cloud solutions are made available via three deployment models – onpremise (enabling firms to modernise on-premise environment in line with public cloud; cloud at the customer (whereby we bring cloud solutions to customer’s premises which stays behind firm’s firewall; and public cloud.

Explaining how Oracle helps customers in their cloud journey, Samaranayake said one option is optimising the on-premise environment of a firm with the Oracle public cloud. 

“Another is bringing the Cloud machine to customer’s premises whilst we also allow customers to move their workloads to our Cloud platforms. Some customers who develop new applications are hosted on our PaaS and IaaS. There are customers who are modernising via SaaS by putting everything on the Cloud,” he added.

The most in demand SaaS solutions are for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Oracle claiming leadership, Human Capital Management (HCM), Customer Experience (CX) and Supply Chain Management (SCM).  

Samaranayake said that Sri Lanka’s rapid adoption is impressive as some have begun their cloud journey by putting one or couple of processes or a business function such as planning and budgeting, and some opting for complete digital transformation.  “There are different ways towards Cloud and we are making it easier as a partner to the transition and transformation to Cloud,” he said, adding, “we serve from startups to global giants.” He said companies keen on Cloud have lot of options and can start small, go live with three months and have a quick win and go for the next stage. “The options on offer from Oracle is why the uptake in Sri Lanka is very high,” said Samaranayake. 

He listed Virtusa as one of the firms from many which have opted for both Oracle ERP and HCM solutions, whilst MAS Holdings has signed up for HCM solutions to start with.

Three fundamentals of Oracle Cloud is being most complete, innovative and proven with the latter characteristic helping businesses to eliminate risk factors. “Implementation of Cloud solutions can be as quick as three to six months,” he added. 

According to Samaranayake, Oracle ERP Cloud was recently named a leader in 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites. Out of 11 products evaluated, Oracle ERP Cloud is positioned the highest for both completeness of vision and ability to execute. 

Overall, over 420,000 customers across 195 countries and territories have harnessed Oracle technology to accelerate their digital transformation.