Accelerating Digital Transformation with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI)

Recent times were tough. Thankfully, technological ‘locomotives of resilience’ such as cloud, 4G/5G, automation, IoT, data analytics, and AI and ML helped businesses isolate the distressing effects of the ‘new normal’ and saved the abrupt covid-induced transition — in the form of teleworking, telemedicine, distant learning, social networking, entertainment, etc., — from turning into a catastrophe.

Today, businesses are incredibly robust, agile, 360-degree intelligent, capable of capitalizing the evolving markets, fathoming the changing customer expectations, unlocking product differentiation, gaining competitive advantage, reinventing management, while multiplying market share and return on investment, all with the help of cutting-edge information technology. For digital transformation to reinforce these many changes, it cannot be just about plugging in new technology. 

It rather requires a strategic approach, and supporting infrastructure, that addresses the five key domains — Customer Engagement, Value Proposition, Competition, Innovation, and Data.

Note: Following is an excerpt from Satyendra and Infolob's elaborated view on the benefits of Digital Transformation with OCI Whitepaper

The five key domains of digital transformation

In the book titled ‘The Digital Transformation Playbook’, David L. Rogers classifies digital transformation into five key domains that sufficiently and always intertwine with each other. Let us discuss what they are, and how they can help accelerate digital transformation while creating the desired effect of amplifying value and efficiency in all possible spheres for a business.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is customer obsession. Businesses need to know their customers better than they know themselves. And they need to admit the fact that their customers may leave their business for a better option, at any moment. In a report published by Deloitte, 7 out of 10 customer organizations that avail products and services from a vendor show willingness to explore new opportunities [1].

Customer engagement as customer obsession is a popular phenomenon, and the world has already shifted to a business ecosystem that thrives on the idea of customers being the single most important factor. On the other hand, customers expect the similar amount of ease and value as they receive from, for example, Uber, or Airbnb.

Value Proposition

Digital technologies change how we connect and create value for our customers. Historically, the value proposition has only been about a set of constant offerings at the core, that is although updated over time, however, not at the pace required. This conservatism in the value proposition leads to disruption by the competitors who seize opportunities as and when arise, divest from diminishing sources of advantage, and embrace change (in this case, digital transformation) earlier than anyone in the industry.

Competition

Competition in the digital age has a new definition. It is no more restricted to the competitors offering the same set of products and services that an organization has built its business around. The aegis has rather grown to subsume the supply chain partners and the ‘feeder’ businesses that have hitherto been assisting the organization. A surprising and distinguishing characteristic of this kind of competitive setup is also the element of cooperation between the traditional competitors. It gives the way to effectively depose the challenges that are mutual to both, and even a greater number of rival organizations.

Data

Digital technologies have changed our world perhaps most significantly in how we think about data. In traditional businesses, data was expensive to obtain and difficult to store and utilize amid organizational silos. Just managing this data required massive IT systems to be purchased and maintained. Today, data is being generated at an unprecedented rate – not just by companies but by everyone. Besides, cloud-based systems for storing data are also becoming increasingly cheap, accessible, and cooked to perfection in terms of functionality, security, and ease. The biggest yet the easiest challenge, therefore, is to turn these enormous amounts of data into assets.  

Innovation

Digital technologies are also transforming the ways businesses innovate. Traditionally, innovation was expensive, high stakes, and insular. Testing new ideas were difficult and expensive, pushing businesses to ‘wild guessing’ their way throughout the product development stage to launching it in the market. Today, digital technologies have enabled testing and experimentation to go on round-the-clock, processes that were inconceivable in the past. Prototypes can be built for pennies and ideas can be tested quickly with user communities. Constant learning and the rapid iteration of products before and after their launching date - are becoming the norm. 

How Oracle Cloud enables these key domains and helps businesses transform rapidly

Businesses need digital transformation, modernization, great customer experience, rapid response to market and competitors, application portability, all through secure, agile, and lucrative infrastructure. 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is pioneering these areas with its mammoth contribution in ground-up transformational services, i.e., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and helping businesses not merely transform but capture all the opportunities via data, customer engagement, value, innovation, and competition, at an accelerated speed.

Fig. - The five layers of OCI services for capitalizing the five key domains of Digital Transformation

Regions -  Regions are basically distributed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hubs located in different geographical locations — for not only enabling and transforming businesses globally, however, also for offering them what nowadays is called the Local Cloud as a Service, i.e., local access to cloud resources. Moreover, Oracle is leading this race with 36 cloud regions worldwide as of March 2021, whereas AWS is a far second.

Core Services - Oracle Cloud’s core services are the enablers of innovation. IT encompasses the entire transformation stack including the latest and the best-of-breed compute, servers, storage, networking, security, and governance/management suite. OCI’s core services offer not just performance but scalability, doing away with the last bit of manacles on rapid innovation. 

Under the compute instance category, Oracle has the famous Bare Metal as part of Gen 2 Oracle cloud with dedicated servers, followed by VMs, GPU shapes, high frequency CPUs, Autonomous Linux, and OS management. Similarly, under Storage, OCI has Block, Object, File, Object Archive, Import appliance, and storage gateway. In networking, OCI offers VCN, Cluster Networking, Load Balancer, Service gateway, FastConnect w/IPSEC VPN, in-flight encryption, and DNS.

For added safety against the novel cyber threats, OCI extends KMS/Virtual vaults, policy/data safe, identity/secrets management, CASB/Cloud guard, WAF, DdoS, etc. Finally, in management, customers get compartments, audit, email, notifications, cost management, RBAC, tagging natively on cloud:

• for authorizing actions
• levels of control across account, subaccount, accessing infrastructure
• resource visibility, in terms of integrated permissions, and security policy 
• search, control, and perform bulk actions, and use of tags for an increasing managed experience
• OCI Metrics, etc.

With the complete range of tools and technologies pooled inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, businesses get to realize innovation, enhance customer engagement, overtake competition, and generate new value.

Data Services - Data is central to businesses irrespective of the industry they belong to, and in order to turn it into an asset as described in the five key domains of digital transformation, businesses need OCI which is jam-packed with the advanced DbaaS/ExaCS (VM and Bare Metal, Exadata Cloud Service), Autonomous Database (dedicated, serverless, ADW, and ATP), NoSQL, Streaming/Kafka, Database migration, Data catalog, and Big Data (Data flow, Data integration).

Developer Services - Coming to the pilots of all services, i.e., the developer services, Oracle Cloud offers AppDev – CI/CD/Deployment, DevOps – Dev tools / resource manager, container ecosystem – Kubernetes / registry / API, serverless functions and events, followed by monitoring and logging. In short, OCI extends an environment that is designed to assist product development in a rapid, and 360-degree service-equipped manner. 

Next Layer Services - The final layer, or the Next Layer Services afforded by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure comprise of innovations, e.g., low-code, analytics, integration, hybrid cloud, and migration. Therefore, digital assistant, visual builder, Oracle analytics, data science, data integration, Exadata Cloud@Customer, identity (AD, SSO, LDAP), Vmware, etc., all serve in maximizing the horizons of accelerated digital transformation, in terms of data, innovation, customer engagement, value, and competition, which again is the need of the hour.

A quick rundown

• With Oracle, you get the most complete, integrated suite of applications and infrastructure in the market, including best-of-breed solutions across every business function: HR, finance, sales, service, marketing, supply chain, and manufacturing
• This means no data silos – minimizing your data integration costs, and
• No disconnected business flows (via Oracle Modern Best Practice built-in business flows), because having separate,

Conclusion

Oracle has been working on the edge of digital transformation, while letting Infolob Solutions Inc., be the physical wheels to the entire process framework. The goal is to transform businesses via accelerated digital transformation.

The future of data-driven businesses with the help of cloud computing is projected to continue, proliferating at a greater pace in the coming years. And, Oracle, which is already a leader in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, is getting even bigger by accommodating more services into every layer of their value and innovation stack. It is exciting to be part of Infolob leadership to help our customers in Defining, Designing, and Delivering their cloud-first strategy with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

References

[1] Accelerating enterprise innovation and transformation with 5G and Wi-Fi 6