Most APAC firms do not understand what PaaS is: Oracle

Businesses across Asia Pacific (APAC) are showing strong signs of agility in some areas and clearly recognise the business benefits of agility (i.e., able to adjust quickly to new business opportunities or to iterate new products and services quickly), according to an Oracle study. However, Oracle’s report, which surveyed 759 employees working for large enterprises in APAC to understand business agility in the age of cloud, highlighted a clear lack of awareness among businesses around how technology like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) can be used to help address challenges such as flexibly managing workloads or rapid development of new applications. “This may leave them at a disadvantage in dealing with competitive threats,” the IT giant said. [caption id=“attachment_2010537” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] Respondents are clear about the benefits of agility, with 85 percent stating that 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) believed that effective mobilisation of applications and services is the most important factor for business success today when it comes to 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 competitive threats. In addition, 60 percent of businesses stated that 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 one month timeframe. “The speed with which many Asian countries are adapting digital technologies like mobile is clearly acknowledged. However, in today’s global economy, there is no time for these organisations to be complacent and rest on their laurels. What this research shows is that many companies are not harnessing the power of PaaS solutions to further boost agility levels, to stay ahead of the digital curve,” said Chris Chelliah, Group Vice President & Chief Architect, Core Technology & Cloud, APAC. 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 state that they fully understand what PaaS is. For those that understand PaaS, the top two benefits were stated as: the effective mobilisation of applications and services (29 percent), and the ability to extend the functionality of cloud based Software-as-a-Service applications to support specific business requirements (25 percent). Other strategic benefits such as savings on the cost of internal IT infrastructure and reduced timeframes for application development were ranked somewhat lower, both at 19 percent. “Businesses clearly know agility holds the key to their success, but there is an awareness gap around exactly how this agility can be realised through the right technology investments,” said Steve Daheb, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud. “Today, PaaS can enable businesses to build new applications quickly – in as little as two weeks – allowing them to launch new internal and customer-facing applications rapidly. This capability allows organisations to react almost immediately to market conditions and get their products and services to customers ahead of the competition.”