Ying Loong Chin, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware, ASEAN
There is a steady growth in cloud adoption among organizations, led by businesses in telecom, BFSI, retail, education, and healthcare sectors, according to Ying Loong Chin, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware, ASEAN. Ying noted that the government, too, is emerging as a big adopter of cloud technologies.
In this Q&A, Ying talks about the company’s Cloud Application Foundation and its relevance in the Philippine setting.
How far has the industry progressed in removing the barriers to cloud adoption?
Clearly, the IT industry has succeeded to a large extent in addressing some of the big barriers to cloud – particularly the concerns around security and privacy of data. The evolution of private cloud model has encouraged many organizations to adopt private or hybrid clouds. Vendors such as Oracle today promise an open architecture and well-defined service level agreements to address some of the other concerns around quality of service, vendor lock-in, and the ability to integrate on-cloud applications with on-premise ones.
Is the government sector in the Philippines the using cloud in a big way?
The Philippine government has been one of the earliest adopters of cloud computing for various e-governance projects. A major adoption of a cloud infrastructure is the Department of Budget and Management. Many public sector organizations have undertaken pilot projects, or have moved their communications and collaboration systems “to the cloud”. These agencies include the Department of Education and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority.
For the governments, a private cloud means access to all benefits of cloud computing but with none of the attendant data security concerns. On their part, IT vendors including Oracle have enabled cloud adoption by offering the next generation of cloud-based government services delivery. The goal is to help governments develop flexible systems that integrate multiple functions and departments.
Within the government, smaller departments with budgetary constraints can use the pay-as-you-go model to deliver high-quality citizen services. In fact, governments of developing nations are likely to be early and heavy adopters of cloud.
Why is cloud integration such a big challenge for enterprises?
The challenge for enterprises is to maximize the business value of a mixed IT environment where cloud coexists with legacy systems. The main hindrance cited is the inability to integrate the cloud app with other software. Companies have abandoned roughly one cloud app a year due to integration problems. Industry experts today cite cloud integration as one of the last remaining barriers to adoption of cloud services, especially for apps that need to exchange information
What strategies can businesses use to achieve cloud integration with their existing functions or processes?
Achieving cloud integration requires building a framework for seamless exchange of information among systems. Ideally, business users should be able to work across multiple applications without having to worry about the complexity of managing apps from various cloud vendors. Defining a cohesive vision for unifying SaaS applications with on-premise information systems is highly recommended in order to achieve the promised benefits of cloud computing, such as greater flexibility and lower costs. CIOs must ensure that all aspects of cloud integration align with their strategic vision for IT; with attention to audits and compliance, security standards, and governance, instead of focusing only on quick connectivity.
How does Oracle aim to help organizations achieve cloud integrations?
Oracle’s cloud portfolio has been built precisely to address cloud integration issues as it offers integrated technologies which can integrate on-premise applications with cloud application. As Oracle integration technologies are based on open standards they can integrate both Oracle and non-Oracle applications on premise and on cloud.
Oracle’s data and cloud integration products are part of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is a unified platform that accommodates all types of information systems, deployment models, SaaS vendors, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) infrastructure, anchored by a cohesive set of tools for development, management, security, and governance. For a business, it means a cohesive and flexible integration platform that is superior to any alternate strategy.
What is the Oracle strategy and innovation around cloud computing?
Oracle is the most comprehensive cloud provider on the planet. Our cloud strategy hinges on delivering a fully-enterprise grade portfolio of cloud services and solutions, built to provide high performance, reliability, scalability, availability, security and standards-based interoperability. We support both public and private clouds to give customer choice; as we recognize that organizations are adopting different deployment models for cloud computing for different applications at different rates of speed. We are also delivering complete PaaS and IaaS product offerings, as well as offering a very broad portfolio of horizontal and industry applications that are deployed in either a private shared services environment or in a public SaaS model.
What is the business opportunity that you see from the Philippine SMB community?
SMBs’ adoption of cloud has risen strongly with cost savings and flexibility acting as their key motivators. The biggest advantage is that cloud allows smaller firms to use a world-class infrastructure without committing a huge amount of money or resources. The pay-per-use model also gives them the agility and flexibility to grow quickly when demand increases.
