APAC biz inclined towards cloud agility yet lack in PaaS

NEW DELHI, INDIA: “Oracle Cloud Agility” study revealed that businesses across Asia Pacific (APAC) are showing strong signs of agility in some areas and clearly recognise the business benefits of agility.

However, Oracle’s research also highlights 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.

The Oracle Cloud Agility study surveyed 759 employees working for large enterprises in APAC to understand business agility in the age of cloud.

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) believe 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 reveals 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.

In fact, the survey results bear out the assessment that businesses are not fully aware of how PaaS can increase operational agility. Only 26 pc 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 pc.