Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In
- by yaldahhakim
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
.shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
Normal
0
false
false
false
false
EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
Oracle Cloud Applications: The
Right Ingredients Baked In
Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these
ingredients together. The same goes for
the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By
themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what
unlocks real transformation power.
Choosing the right cloud can be
very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core
ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in
building a cloud-based application. For
instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality
that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade
cloud.
Cloud computing is more than just
consuming an "application as service", and having someone else manage it for
you. Rather, the value of cloud is about
making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it
takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we
communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients
in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a
consolidated lens. When this doesn’t
happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn't seamlessly connect
with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and
quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer
with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing
something.
Mixing ingredients is similar to
bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional
on premise applications. This is where a shared services platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls
for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most
likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.)
Open standards is the best way to deliver
a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of
where your apps are deployed. It’s also
the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume
from a third party. Just like using
standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards
based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other
systems. Your
IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to
actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for
help at all. This frees IT resources to focus
more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and
maintain.
Carrying the cake analogy forward,
you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t
leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top
later. This is what a lot of our niche
competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics,
and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these
technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines
them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way.
In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud
is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich
across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social,
mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across
business processes. This strategy
enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions
to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational
technologies.