During Quest Forum Digital Event: Innovation Week, Shirley Lum, Product Marketing Director at Oracle, delivered a presentation on how to maximize your on-premises investment as you embrace digital innovation from the inside out.

Today’s Current Business Landscape

Lum began with a realistic view of the current business landscape – businesses are being forced to shut down. Employees are primarily working remotely unless they have been laid off or placed on furlough. The entire supply chain has been turned upside-down, so the concentration of supply and demand has shifted from the commercial and industry sector to the consumer side. What does this mean for business?

An article from McKinsey shows that the majority of executives believe that we will return to pre-outbreak levels for GDP, income, and corporate earnings after a long period of time. Businesses will bounce back, but it will be a long, slow, muted process.

With remote work the primary way for employees to interact, we are reliant on digital transformation more than ever. We need more of the following:

• Business Continuity – Keeping businesses open
• Operational Efficiency – Eliminating waste
• Seamless Integration – in serving employees and customers, frontend and backend systems should be integrated to serve up data and process
• Ready and Easy Access to applications
• Agility and Adaptability in this dynamic environment
• Data-Driven Approach – making fact-based decisions for the business

Continuous Innovation and Collaboration

In order to deliver these ideologies, we need innovation. Innovation in this age is actually digitalization, or the use of technologies and digitized data to impact how work gets done and to transform how customers and companies engage and interact. Continuous innovation requires collaboration. Business and IT need to work both better and faster together. Business outcomes and infrastructure outcomes are like two sides of the same coin. The following image illustrates the specific outcomes for each entity and their interaction.

A connected intelligent business is the end goal. When every aspect of your enterprise is connected, your business can respond quickly to the changes impacting it. To realize the flexibility and achieve the speed required to succeed today, your business systems can’t simply reside within siloed organizations. You need a single solution that spans your customers, workforce, finance, supply chain, and data with connected intelligence.

Data is the key to connection. Modernize your business. Start anywhere in any function. You need one common data model with performant, adaptable infrastructure, and applied emerging technologies.

Digital era technology is expected from every business. The pace of innovation over the last three years has been accelerated by emerging technologies. Companies must create a technology strategy in order to meet the growing expectations of their customers. Cloud is a great stepping stone for companies to test out some of the innovative technologies that are currently available. Ranjit Bawa, Deloitte Principal and U.S. Technology Cloud Leader, was quoted in the CIO Journal saying the following, “…The cloud democratizes the ability to test great ideas and bring them to life.”

Journey to the Cloud

You have the ability to choose your own path to the Cloud with Oracle. Some options are:

1. Embrace SaaS altogether. If you have on-prem Unlimited products, migrate them to the Oracle SaaS counterpart.
2. Move and Improve on-premises applications to the cloud. You keep your on-premises apps. Enhance them with modern cloud services as you gradually increase your cloud footprint. With this approach, you can optimize your IT operations. These things are taken care of by Oracle. You can also modernize your App Dev and innovate on-prem apps from the inside out.
3. Instead of going to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the public cloud can come to you. Your IT retains control of this small box cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

The following image lays out the path to the latest hardware and technologies of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:

Apps Unlimited on OCI allows you to move and improve workloads. Oracle Cloud offers a suite of migration, provisioning, and management tools for unlimited applications, making it easy for you to expedite your transition to the Cloud. Automated migration and provisioning tools facilitate rapid deployment while maintaining your key customizations. Practically no re-architecture is required of your applications.

Oracle also has a terraform tool with terraform code which allows you to deploy infrastructure at the code. The code includes networking, security, active control list, compute and storage position, etc. It is used in the terraform, making an easier migration. The terraform is certified on E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards. Hyperion is testing now, with certification expected shortly.

Only Oracle Cloud offers access to proven technologies like RAC, Autonomous Database, and Exadata. It enables customers to take advantage of the latest hardware and technologies. Leverage these technologies to improve database and application performance and results.

There are several deployment choices when moving workloads to OCI. The image below shows options from basic (far left) to more complex (far right).

Apps Unlimited + Cloud Infrastructure

Security

With over 40 years of experience creating secure databases used by the CIA, NSA, and others, Oracle is distinct in its mission to develop business software and technology that protects and manages the customer’s business data. Proactive defense at every layer of the stack—malware, resistant hardware, hardware root of trust that can wipe server firmware clean, network architecture design leading in the industry, secure isolation zones—keeps your business secure.

Additionally, Oracle Internet Intelligence is a safe internet initiative to an active global internet map and tools. It is available to the public and internet network admins. It is intended to help make the internet a safer place for cloud customers. With over a decade of experience, Oracle monitors traffic and 1.5 million IPs around the world. It is managed with expert tools and staff by Oracle.

Benefits

Migrating your current deployment to OCI gains you access to better elasticity to support peak season, agility to add new capabilities, streamlined infrastructure management, and a lower total cost of ownership. You get granular control over your environment while leveraging the same software, licenses, and training your staff and end users currently have. Behind the scenes is OCI. For end users, there is no change whatsoever. Once you have migrated to OCI, you can deploy in hours, not days.

The following image shows some of the proven hard and soft cost savings of migrating to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:

AI-Driven Platform Technologies

On top of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a complete set of AI-driven platform technologies. Some of these include:

• Integration service
• Digital Assistant
• Visual Builder
• Identity Management
• Analytics

Once you migrate on-premises applications to OCI, you are able to improve by connecting and extending. Connection means creating more efficient business processes. Accelerate connection with on-premises applications, third parties, data, and processes. Extending is the thing that makes you different from your competitors. To extend, build new applications and new experiences to support your unique business model.

Integration

Uncomplicated integration connects your business beyond silos of data, applications, and technologies. Roughly 90 percent of companies use a hybrid cloud – combining public and private. This means the environment is segmented, and it can be difficult to see a comprehensive view of the business. Inconsistency and inefficiency exist when this is the case.

The desire is integration with systems that do not have an API or adapters and rapid integration prototyping. This is achieved with visual tooling for full lifecycle, from design to development and monitoring. Automatic repetitive non-decision-making human interactions and integration with heavily customized on-premises and SaaS Enterprise Applications are the goal with uncomplicated integration.

Oracle Integration is a connected enterprise. It allows you to:

• Scale and future-ready your enterprise with prebuilt adapters and integration flows in hybrid environments
• Save time and reduce errors with smart recommended mappings and robotic process automation
• Increase productivity with simpler, low-code user experiences for both business analysts and IT developers
• Strengthen the management of risk and compliance with business visibility, agility, and control using integration analytics and end-to-end process lifecycle.

Quick Guide for Journey to the Cloud

Follow these steps for a quick guide for your journey to the cloud:

1. Develop a technology strategy with a platform approach to drive innovation as you go.
2. Move Apps Unlimited to OCI for immediate unmatched price-to-performance gains.
3. Drive a plug-and-play model for innovative technologies from the inside out, based on business needs.
4. Migrate On-Prem applications to Oracle Cloud for the full breadth of innovations using a phased-in approach.
5. Lines of business need to partner with It to drive mutually beneficial innovation.

Key Takeaways

The Oracle Cloud Platform Technology Services are designed to accelerate innovation with built-in SaaS native AI and AI-powered platform technologies. They are easily adaptable to a continuously changing business landscape. You can go at your own pace, using what you need, when you need it. The Oracle Cloud empowers you to easily address unique business requirements regarding innovation technologies to connect and extend. It is best suited for Oracle applications with one support model—built in the cloud and made for business users. Yet, it is robust for app developers and remains up to date with the latest technologies. Oracle Cloud is a recognized innovation leader with services powered by AI/ML and open standards eliminating vendor lock-in risk. Finally, it is best in class with the broadest PaaS offerings and the most pre-built connections.