Oracle India has shared tips to CIOs to select enterprise applications.
Mobile, social, big data, analytics and Cloud are redefining how business gets done today. Immediate access to the latest technologies is essential for organizations to innovate and thrive.
Jayas Damodaran, senior director – Oracle India says enterprise CIOs need to have concurrence on IT procurement decisions as the ultimate intent of the purchase is to improve employee productivity, business efficiency, provide superior customer service – all resulting in company good will and profitability. These decisions can’t be made in silos or separately.
When an application is being implemented, CIOs need to decide the delivery model. An on-premise model may provide more flexibility in terms of tailored-packages, however, they may be costlier than a cloud-based model. There is also the question of which model actually meets the needs of the organization.
Enterprise CIOs need to have clarity on the reasons for migrating to the cloud, if such a decision is made and evaluate the service provider’s capabilities as the subject matter expert and also the authority in all decisions pertaining to IT.
A cloud pilot project is a good way for an organization to evaluate cloud services to see how useful, reliable and cost-efficient they can be. A pilot project should be a non-critical application that has a limited scope, a short time frame and loosely defined estimates of its RoI.
The CIO should ensure that the right partner is selected and that they put in the best resources to implement the solutions. Prior implementation and best practices that the partner brings to the table are basic criteria in selecting the right partner, said Oracle India.
It is also important to compare solutions. With multiple vendors offering various kinds of solutions in the marketplace, it is important to understand their offerings completely. Each application may not satisfy the organization’s needs a 100 percent. Therefore, it is important to prioritize and see how much customization a solution can offer.
However, the CIO should also understand that while customization is essential, it is imperative that they avoid over-customization. Too much customization can lead to an application that cannot be upgraded in the future without losing all the custom work done.
Challenges and opportunities in enterprise apps
Like any new technology, there are some teething issues that enterprises and CIOs are dealing with in embracing cloud technologies. Enterprises and their management have concerns related to security, privacy and transparency that come with public cloud offerings. In such cases, one needs to encourage customers to do a thorough due diligence of the cloud infrastructure of the vendor – and be assured of security and privacy standards, as well as SLAs in terms of scalability and reliability.
Other important challenge among customers today is user adoption. This has to be taken care of by solutions offerings that provide superior user experiences besides supporting social collaboration as well as enterprise mobility. Sustained training and enablement can also aid adoption.
Cisco’s recent announcement that it will construct the world’s largest network of clouds with its partners will allow the company to cash in on the trend of rising expenditures among enterprises for cloud architecture and services, according IHS Technology.
Enterprises will spend more than $235 billion on cloud architecture and services by 2017, a 35 percent gain from the $174 billion projected to be spent this year, and triple the $78 billion expended in 2011. This year alone, cloud spending is pegged to rise 20 percent from $145 billion last year, as shown in the attached figure.
Jagdish Rebello, senior director for information technology at IHS, said: “In these cloud-based settings, enterprises also want to integrate the deep analytical power of big data, which will give them competitive advantages through insights about present and prospective customers.”
Enterprises are simultaneously augmenting their on-site services and capabilities with the cloud and gradually transferring those functions to online competencies.
IHS says the tasks at present center on developing initially limited sets of new apps and services that will live only in the cloud. Once they learn to create uniquely cloud-based services, apps and content, it’s likely that the new offerings will not only multiply but will also skyrocket in terms of customer acceptance.
A Citrix Enterprise Mobility survey that was conducted by Zinnov with 130 IT and business stakeholders in 65 organizations across India recently noted that 97 percent has deployed corporate email through enterprise mobility solutions, according to Citrix Enterprise Mobility survey that was conducted by Zinnov with 130 IT and business stakeholders in 65 organizations across India.
The survey said enterprise applications such as CRM (planned by 38 percent organizations), ERP (40 percent), SCM (31 percent), Sales Force Automation (25 percent) as well as Time Management / Billing & Field Service / Order Booking applications (25 percent) are expected to witness mobilization.
Top three benefits they accrued through enterprise mobility included improved productivity, enhanced competitiveness and ensuring better customer service.
Oracle offerings
Whether on-premise or a cloud-based model, Oracle’s application strategy is to offer choice and flexibility with the most comprehensive, modern, and secure portfolio of products and services to fit into an organization’s business needs. Cloud- applications can be used to empower employees, ensuring they have access to the data, applications and features they need to do their jobs more effectively.
Oracle offers a number of business applications across the stack and to companies in every domain and every industry. “We believe that a user-friendly and simple interface is the primary user need for every single business application,” said Jayas Damodaran, senior director – Oracle India.
Industries like telecom retail, e-commerce, education, and government are increasingly using the applications to simplify IT. Oracle has customers across almost all the industry verticals – and leading organizations in each of these verticals have deployed and reaping the benefits of Oracle’s enterprise applications.
Sharda University, a private university in Delhi, NCR, has deployed Oracle’s PeopleSoft Solutions to transform its academic, finance and administrative functions. This new technology has powered admissions from 2012-13 academic years.
CRMIT Solutions, a market specialist in delivering On Demand CRM solutions using cloud computing, has deployed Oracle Fusion CRM to manage its global sales and marketing lifecycles and enhance the productivity of enterprise sales, marketing and service professionals.
Rajani Baburajan
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