As IT executives and staff work to enable better collaboration between employees and customers while supporting faster delivery of new business capabilities, they face the challenge of asking IT teams to adopt new technologies and vendors – while IT budgets are largely flat.

Meanwhile, skills and organizational structures need to change with the demand for new, hybrid cloud approaches for core business applications. There is tremendous pressure to create best-in-class systems, tailored to the organization, that enable business agility.

As part of its mission to provide high-quality education, networking and advocacy to its members, the Oracle Cloud User Community, OC2, with the Quest International Users Group recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study of 100 organizations that run core business applications in a hybrid cloud environment.

What Do ROI Leaders Do Differently?

What makes this study different and especially valuable to OC2 and Quest members is that we focused on a select subset of survey respondents. Our joint team of Forrester Consulting with OC2 and Quest specialists concentrated our analysis on organizations that are highly satisfied with the value they receive from their hybrid cloud applications investment.

We wanted to learn and share with our members the real-world secrets to achieving highly satisfactory returns on investments (ROI). The survey explored skills and strategies critical to success when running business applications in hybrid clouds, as well as challenges yet to be overcome.

We chose to survey companies running a range of on premises and software as a services (SaaS) core business application product lines from Oracle and other software providers. Consequently, OC2 and Quest members can learn from best practices across a wide range of company sizes and industries such as high tech, manufacturing, and financial services, to name just a few. One surprise from our survey efforts is that we hand an unusually high response rate from the C-Suite. Nearly two thirds of respondents who were highly satisfied with the value received from hybrid cloud investments were C-level executives.

Top Takeaways to Help You Achieve Greater Hybrid Cloud ROI 

So, what do the leaders do differently that makes them highly satisfied with their return on investment in hybrid cloud environments?

Firms highly satisfied with the value of their hybrid cloud approach to core business application deployment have gained greater agility, flexibility, security, and scalability — with some surveyed firms reporting a significant cost savings over traditional on-premises deployment. These firms seek to further increase benefits by increasing the cloud’s share of the application portfolio. The study shows:

• Highly satisfied hybrid cloud adopters will continue their march to the cloud over the next few years, rapidly shifting more applications away from on-premises toward SaaS and public cloud.
• Companies are assessing mid-journey how individual applications are deployed, seeking even greater ROI, beyond already satisfying results.
• Companies address challenges with security, data management, and skills with a three-pronged skills initiative to rely on partners, retrain, and recruit new staff.
• IT leaders understand they need greater budgets for new technology, but they also understand the growing need for the business side to take on more responsibility for core business applications.

Learn More, Do More

Learn more in “Gain Agility While Mitigating Risk Through Hybrid Cloud,” a custom Technology Adoption Profile commissioned by Quest International Users Group with the Oracle Cloud User Community and Forrester Consulting.