The cloud way of developing and deploying apps

Despite Southeast Asia being a conducive environment for new start-ups to thrive in, it still has a large install base of multinational corporations (MNCs), each with a dearth of legacy, on-premise applications that is pervasive across the business.

What might the cloud adoption landscape in this part of the world, look like over the next few years. We know there are differing levels of tech maturity and uptake in the many different markets nestled in this region.

How might their path forward in terms of tech adoption look like, and what are the options that lay before them?

Rick Jewell, Oracle’s Senior Vice President for Application Development, had described, “Your (business’) journey to the cloud can vary. No one will do the big bang method.”

He broke it down to at least four different speeds or phases of cloud adoption– hosting where IT cost reduction is the most obvious benefit, moving silo-ed business functions like logistics or product lifecycle management (PLM) to the cloud, moving end-to-end business processes like procure-to-pay and plan-to-produce to the cloud, and the most transformational of all, enterprise transformation, where the whole organisation becomes involved.

Enterprise transformation is where the MNC is driving a 2-tier strategy – the corporate-level system at headquarters where there is a core on-premise solution like Oracle E-Business Suite, and a group of smaller sites that undergo ‘divisional modernisation’, or simply move their business apps to the cloud.

“This way, the organisation is able to gain consistency of operations and reporting,” said Jewell.

GE Health is one example of a MNC undergoing enterprise transformation; branching out into countries like Vietnam in SEA and quickly getting the on-premise solution, into cloud, for that particular business site in Vietnam.

The mid-market segment – ripe for cloud

According to Oracle’s VP of Apps for Mid Market, Rajen Sanggaran, Oracle tends to play in the enterprise space, and this has been the case for the longest time. “But, there is concerted plan to go after the mid-market.”

And from the mid-market’s point of view, there are many benefits attached to taking up cloud. For one, they can deploy business IT, faster and there is the benefit of business agility.

Rajen said, “We work with partners in certain verticals and who can provide domain expertise, to offer price point bundles to small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).”

Basically, solutions offered to enterprises are “brought down” to scoped business processes that are required by SMEs. For example, core financials solutions, planning and budgeting capabilities and so on.

KPMG is one partner Oracle works with, that offers advisory to many startups. “KPMG (is able to) lend what’s required to set things up and running in a few weeks,” Rajen described.

The cloud way of developing and deploying apps

Oracle has 19 data centres around the world, hosting apps to serve customers around the globe.

Oracle Corp’s Executive Vice President, Steve Miranda had earlier shared during Oracle’s Modern Business Summit in Singapore in March, that Oracle hosting customer software, allows Oracle to optimise the system and improve software performance because of precise monitoring.

Oracle Vice President of Applications, Cloud ERP/SCM, Jasbir Singh said, “We can see every app layer of our customers’ set up.”

In fact, he opined that customers sign up for Oracle cloud because of its ability to deploy upgrades early and quickly.

“Up till now, we are able to share future features of solutions, enhancements and functional upgrades, without the customer having to ask for it.

“Running the apps for customers in the cloud, we are able to bring in innovation after innovation with each release,” Jasbir pointed out.

Oracle boasts being able to offer software-as-a-service, and the ability to extend that with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to build out apps with integration points (to third party apps) and extend it further with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), that can host third-party apps.