By Ekaterina Kober
Head of Digital Prime, Oracle ASEAN
If 2020 was the year where technology laggards are finally acknowledging the need for a digital business model, 2021 will be the year where we will see businesses learning from lessons the past year had taught us and embrace cloud-based applications more proactively to keep their operations running.
As companies start picking themselves up from the ongoing pandemic, one thing is clear – agile, cost-effective and robust cloud computing solutions will play a defining role in helping organizations build digital resiliency.
Central to the adoption of cloud-based solutions in ASEAN are Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), who fulfill a fundamental role in the IT ecosystem by delivering the industry or task-specific cloud applications to companies across all economic sectors and sizes, helping them innovate and embrace the digital world cost-effectively.
To thrive themselves, ISVs need the cloud too. So, what should they look for to drive continuous value in the cloud ecosystem?
Prioritizing performance and security
To help ISVs bring their past forward as they build their future, we know they need a comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure and platform cloud services that meet performance and security needs of legacy mission-critical applications. Equally important to have is access to a comprehensive array of services to build, support, enhance and manage ISV applications: from application development and business analytics to data management, integration, security, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to enable you to create afresh industry leading applications.
Take Vietnamese fintech, MoMo, for example. MoMo was voted the most popular electronic wallet in three consecutive years (2018, 2019, 2020). The company is set up and licensed by the State Bank of Vietnam to provide e-wallet services, collection, payment and money transfer services across Vietnam. With the belief that a better financial service could help people to improve quality of life, MoMo serves as an extension arm of banks & financial institutions to bring down the financial service availability to Vietnam including the major rural areas. MoMo quickly became the No.1 Super App in Vietnam by providing an enhanced consumer experience and forming a partnership with more than 30,000 incumbent players.
With 23 million registered users, transactions on their platform surged in 2020 and to better serve their customers, MoMo had upgrade their core system with Oracle in the main part; and start to explore Oracle Cloud as they were looking for a solution to get predictable performance and lower total cost of operation with an optimized Oracle Database solution, delivering increased query speeds, supporting massive database consolidation, and requiring fewer IT staff and specialized skills. All while ensuring the security standards as outlined by the central bank are being met.
Ensuring scalability to achieve growth
Next on the list is the capability of the infrastructure to support the ISV as it continues to grow its user base, especially in the era where consumers are consuming more digital content.
Phoenix Publishing House provides a holistic digital learning program called Aralinks to private schools in the Philippines to help create active, dynamic, flexible, and collaborative learning environments where students develop the skills they need for work and life. During the pandemic, there was a huge surge in demand for online learning, which translated into much higher monthly costs that got the customer to evaluate alternative cloud vendors. According to the customer, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was an easier to use, better performance, easier to scale solution that delivered 30-40% savings on their monthly billing from their existing cloud provider.
Keeping overheads low to optimize bottom line
Ultimately, just like any other businesses, ISVs need to optimize their bottom line by ensuring that they can increase their revenue while keeping costs down. ISVs that can successfully do this are able to see the cost benefit of their investment and strengthen their value proposition to their customers from both a product and pricing perspective.
An example of this is Disrptiv Exchange, a digital value chain automation and analytics company headquartered in Singapore, whose business is to provide simple solutions to complex problems. The company deliberately chose to migrate the workloads for its flagship Software as a Service (SaaS) product called glassRUN, a Digital B2B Mobile Commerce Platform that simplifies and automates the process of buying, selling and fulfilment across the end-to-end distribution network of an enterprises. With glassRUN, businesses can set up their very own digitally enabled and mobile ready Private B2B Store, within a matter of weeks.
As the eCommerce market saw a boom during the pandemic, Disrptiv Exchange saw the need to enhance the capabilities of the infrastructure in which its glassRUN offering runs on. The company saw an opportunity to expand its customer base, but also wanted to ensure that it can elevate the performance of its solution without having to price glassRUN at a premium to customers. As such, having a cloud infrastructure that is robust, secure and cost-optimised is key for the business.
Disrptiv Exchange has been hosting its glassRUN solution workloads on another cloud, before deciding to move their workloads to OCI, citing the cloud economics benefits for their business. As a result of this move, Disrptiv Exchange saw a 25 % reduction in costs without performance degradation. The company was able to boost its product performance, enhancing its service delivery to customers without jeopardizing on its profitability model. It is also important to note here that this migration was conducted seamlessly without the need for any specialised training and absolutely no impact to the production environment. The company intends to further leverage OCI and other Oracle offerings to offer value added benefits and advantages to its customers.
At Oracle, ISVs are both our partners and customers, and we are dedicated to strengthening ISV relationships, helping you architect, deploy and scale their commercial applications in the cloud.
