Study indicates that 58 percent of businesses' IT
organizations are unprepared for competitive threats, including
competitors' ability to launch new applications faster
LONDON, Aug. 27, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Oracle
announces the results of its "Oracle Cloud Agility" study and
revealed that businesses in Europe, the Middle
East and Africa (EMEA)
overestimate their agility. While a majority of businesses believe
they are agile, Oracle's research highlights that many
organizations cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop,
test, and launch new applications, leaving them poorly prepared to
deal with competitive threats. The study also found a lack of
awareness among businesses around how technology, like
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), can be used to help address these
challenges.
The Oracle Cloud Agility study surveyed 1,004 employees working
for large enterprises in EMEA to understand business agility in the
age of cloud. The results show that 62 percent consider their
organization to be agile (i.e., able to adjust quickly to new
business opportunities or to iterate new products and services
quickly).
Respondents are clear about the benefits of agility, with 78
percent stating that the ability to rapidly develop, test, and
launch new business applications is either important or critically
important to the success of their business. In particular, nearly
one third of respondents (30 percent) believe the effective
mobilization of applications and services is the most important
factor for business success today when it comes to IT
infrastructure.
The study also reveals that the competitiveness impact of
agility is critically important to businesses. In fact, the ability
of competitors to launch innovative customer services more rapidly
was identified as the top threat by businesses (27 percent). Up to
58 percent of respondents state their businesses do not have an IT
infrastructure capable of responding to these competitive
threats.
Significantly, the survey reveals the agility benefits delivered
by PaaS are not being leveraged. In fact, according to the survey,
59 percent of EMEA businesses either cannot, or do not know if they
can shift workloads between public, private, and hybrid clouds, and
migrate on-premises applications to the cloud. Additionally,
respondents indicate only 44 percent of businesses can develop,
test, and deploy new business applications for use on mobile
devices within six months, with this figure falling to just 27
percent within a one month timeframe.
"There is something of an awareness gap emerging around how
businesses can become more agile. While some companies already view
themselves as agile, most of these are not yet able to realise the
power of PaaS solutions to help them launch new services quickly.
Other companies are just now starting their journey on the agility
curve," said Tino Scholman,
Vice-President, Oracle Cloud, EMEA. "If you want to become more
innovative and experiment more often, then you have to make sure
your Cost of Innovation goes down and goes down quickly. We want to
help bridge this awareness gap by showing businesses how the right
cloud platform solution can enable them to react almost immediately
to market conditions and get well ahead of the competition."
The survey results bear out the assessment that businesses are
not fully aware of how PaaS can increase operational agility. Only
34 percent of respondents state that they fully understand what
PaaS is, while 20 percent admit that they do not understand it at
all. For those that say they do understand PaaS, only 28 percent
cite reduced timeframes for application development as a main
benefit, far behind less strategic benefits such as savings on the
cost of internal IT infrastructure (45 percent).
"The best PaaS solutions, such as the Oracle Cloud Platform,
deliver levels of agility not seen before. With simplified
integration into existing IT infrastructures, the Oracle Cloud
Platform can help businesses react immediately to customer demand
through new services, while simultaneously driving innovation
around internal business applications."
Additional Resources
- Oracle Platform-as-a-Service
- Oracle Cloud Days
- Watch the Oracle Cloud Platform Webcast series
- Register for Oracle Cloud Days
Additional Information
For this research Oracle
partnered with Opinium Research to survey 1,004 individuals from
large enterprises, with respondents coming from countries including
France, Germany, Poland, and the UK.
About Oracle
Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully
integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services. For
more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL),
visit oracle.com.
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