Is Australia at the Front of the Cloud Curve?

Cloud computing is coming of age in Australia. Between our “cloud first” government policy and the wave of businesses rolling into the cloud, a broad modernization lies ahead. 

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd recently predicted that by 2025, 80% of worldwide IT spending will be in the cloud. Australian companies and government agencies could well get there sooner.

We think so, which is why this week we’re bolstering our local capabilities by delivering the Oracle Cloud platform locally from within Australia.

The updated local offering will increase the choice available to customers in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in the rest of the Asia Pacific region. It adds infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, builds on our Cloud at Customer offering, and complements our software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings across finance, HR, and marketing, which we’ve delivered onshore since 2012. 

These new and augmented cloud offerings place Oracle as the only vendor in Australia able to give customers complete choice across SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS services. This complete offering is a game-changer for customers because, rather than having to add a huge new roster of cloud suppliers, they can now meet their varied and fast-changing requirements with a single vendor, dramatically reducing complexity and response times.

And having a local presence for platform cloud lets us manage service levels and respond to local customers better for a variety of reasons, including our ability to satisfy data sovereignty requirements.

Economic Stimulus

Moving more of their IT to the cloud gives Australian companies and agencies the opportunity to cut their IT management costs and reinvest those savings in their core businesses and front-of-house services. And with a greater focus on innovation, the potential boon for the Australian economy is enormous.

Traditional IT departments are already moving disaster recovery production environments, development and test, and virtualized workloads into these less expensive, more flexible cloud environments. With each step, IT leaders are unlocking more innovation.

However, while Aussies are known for being proactive in business, early cloud movers will need to apply some savvy. One early-mover mistake, especially among non-IT purchasers, is to select a slew of cloud providers promising cheap services. Suddenly, companies and agencies need to manage 10 to 20 cloud vendors.

The smart players start with the end in mind, considering the overall experience and outcomes they want for the business. Unlike our competitors, Oracle provides the same experience on premises as we do in the cloud. That means customers can transition seamlessly, adapting based on their own appetite.

Global Investment

As customers prepare to make this transition, Oracle, in turn, is making considerable investments in Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Cloud now delivers nearly 1,000 SaaS applications and 50 enterprise-class PaaS and IaaS services to customers in more than 195 countries, supporting 55 billion transactions each day.

In the hyper-digitized world we live in, agility is fundamental to all organizations, which simply don’t have the time and resources to buy hardware, install software, and build applications from the ground up.

Oracle’s flexible subscription model means that customers can turn on features and scale their consumption across business functions as needed. We’ve changed the way we sell our services, so that our full stack can now meet the needs of large and small organizations.

SuiteBox, a Kiwi ISV, is a case in point. Offering video collaboration services, SuiteBox rose to success on a cloud infrastructure, but to meet expanding demand, it needed more compute power.

Because Oracle could combine the stack of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, SuiteBox was able to not only gain the extra compute, but also augment its service with Oracle’s document collaboration and workflow management services. As a result, SuiteBox was able to add substantial new offerings and create new revenue streams.

This example typifies the kinds of opportunities we’re creating with customers. Oracle isn’t just providing technology; we’re also supporting genuine business growth.   By: Chris Chelliah

Christopher Chelliah is group vice president and chief architect for core technology and cloud at Oracle Asia Pacific.