RECORDER REPORT

KARACHI: Small and medium size businesses, besides enterprises in Pakistan can automate their processes using the best available IT platform without spending too much with pay-as-you-grow subscription model under Oracle Cloud Platform.

“Not only organisations in banking and telecom sectors are utilising cloud computing but textiles, logistics, other manufacturing sectors, SMEs and startup businesses are also adapting to new technologies in Pakistan,” Country Sales Director, Pakistan & Afghanistan at Oracle Waqas Hashmi said.

Pakistani customers are always willing to adopt new technologies, however, the cost is a major factor for them to consider, he observed, saying that “Cloud computing is a cost effective solution to the businesses and cloud adoption is gradually increasing in Pakistan.”

Innovation, business agility, a better customer experience, the potential benefits of cloud have made it a key component in enterprise IT strategies, with more than 90 percent of companies adopting cloud computing to some degree, he pointed out.

He said that industry leaders were embracing digital technologies at an ever increasing pace to create innovative business processes that disrupt their markets but many enterprises are still struggling to achieve the agility that’s so critical to their success.

Developing and testing new applications and setting up new environments can take weeks or even months. Just the task of maintaining the database and middleware that support all the application development and deployment environments can become time consuming that IT has little opportunity to update or extend existing applications, he said.

Waqas said that organisations were finding that by using cloud-based platform offerings — called platform as a service (PaaS) — to develop and deploy applications, they could eliminate the cost and complexity of managing the underlying application platforms.

Businesses that use PaaS have reported operational savings of up to 50 percent compared to using siloed technology stacks. “With Oracle Cloud Platform, organisations in Pakistan can innovate faster, increase productivity, and lower their costs. From collaboration to mobile development, from business intelligence and big data analytics to the Internet of Things, Oracle Cloud Platform is simply the most integrated and comprehensive cloud platform available today,” he added.

“Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud,” he said, adding that Oracle Cloud Platform provided all the benefits of cloud with complete, integrated, secure solutions at every layer of the technology stack.

With the Oracle Cloud Platform, customers and partners are able to take advantage of the industry-leading Oracle middleware and database software that thousands of global organizations already use to run their own businesses, all delivered via cloud, he said.

The extensive level of automation that has been engineered into the Oracle Cloud, results in faster time-to-value, greater innovation, and lower cost for customers. The Oracle Cloud Platform helps customers build new applications, extend existing ones, and easily move existing on-premises workloads to the cloud with no application changes, he said.

The services are designed to maximize end user experience and productivity; enable developers to manage and analyze data, rapidly develop, test and deploy applications; enable architects to quickly integrate across on-premises and cloud applications; and enable business users to drive rich business insights and enterprise collaboration.

Oracle Cloud continues to show strong adoption, supporting 70+ million users and more than 33 billion transactions each day. It runs on 54,000 devices and more than 700 petabytes of storage in 19 data centers around the world, he said, adding that Oracle Cloud Platform was experiencing exponential growth and already powering some of the world’s most recognizable brands and organizations. Oracle Cloud Platform has more than 1,800 customers with 1,419 added in the last quarter, he said.

With the pay-as-you-go delivery model, organizations can shift infrastructure and software costs from capital to predictable operational expenses — making it easier to scale environments to meet the changing needs of the business, he said.