The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
A cloud agility study by computer-technology company Oracle Corp. showed recently that businesses across the Asia-Pacific region are showing signs of agility in some areas and clearly recognize the business benefits of agility—that is, able to adjust quickly to new business opportunities or to iterate new products and services quickly.
The study, however, also showed a clear lack of awareness among businesses on how technology, like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), can be used to help address challenges, such as flexibly managing workloads or rapidly developing new applications. This may leave them at a disadvantage in dealing with competitive threats.
The study surveyed 759 employees working for large enterprises in the Asia-Pacific to understand business agility in the age of cloud.
Respondents were clear about the benefits of agility, with 85 percent saying the ability to rapidly develop, test and launch new business applications is either important or critically important to the success of their business.
In particular, nearly one-third of respondents (29 percent) believe that the effective mobilization of applications and services is the most important factor for business success today when it comes to information-technology (IT) infrastructure.
The study also revealed that the impact of agility on competitiveness is critically important to businesses. In fact, the ability of competitors to launch innovative customer services more rapidly was identified as the top threat (29 percent).
When it comes to demonstrating signs of being agile, over half (52 percent) of businesses questioned did feel they have an IT infrastructure capable of responding to these threats.
In addition, 60 percent of businesses said they can develop, test and deploy new business applications for use on mobile devices within six months, and nearly half (46 percent) felt that they could achieve this within a month.
“The speed with which many Asian countries are adapting to digital technologies…is clearly acknowledged. However, in today’s global economy, there is no time for these organizations to be complacent and rest on their laurels,” said Chris Chelliah, group vice president and chief architect, Core Technology & Cloud, Asia-Pacific.
“What this research shows is that many companies are not yet harnessing the power of PaaS solutions to further boost agility levels and…stay ahead of the digital curve,” he added.
In fact, the survey results bear out the assessment that businesses are not fully aware of how PaaS can increase operational agility. Only 26 percent of respondents said they fully understand what PaaS is.
For those that say they do, the top two benefits were given as: savings on the cost of internal IT infrastructure (50 percent), and savings on the cost of application development (40 percent).