PERFECTING THE CLOUD RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

It is no secret that the cloud has democratized access to technology previously reserved for only the largest of organizations, leveling the playing field. With it, the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has changed.

No longer is the CIO’s core focus that of ‘keeping the lights on’, and ensuring that technical operations function optimally. Today, the CIO is a partner to the business, driving innovation at DevOps speed and scale, and playing a key role in supporting the company’s go-to-market strategy.

Conceptualizing the perfect cloud approach is not an easy task, especially in today’s fast-paced business environment. Too often, business leaders spend a lot of time debating configurations, especially when deploying enterprise applications – only to find that the business has changed by the time they are done.

Thus, in this new cloud-driven world, the imperative is to move at the speed of business. This will ensure that organizations adjust and move beyond failing fast, to embrace “succeeding fast”.

A walk in the clouds

In the pre-cloud days, IT infrastructure deployment was a tedious and complex process. Monolithic applications meant dealing with multiple vendors and lengthy provisioning timeframes. Today, with the evolution of the cloud, ‘outsourcing’ software (Software-as-a-Service) to be delivered and managed by the experts, while you focus on running your business, is becoming the mainstream.

If a business realizes the need for additional computing firepower as a result of dynamic shifts in the industry landscape or a requirement to play less in the datacentre space, that’s where Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) comes into the picture. After the computing resources needed are determined, businesses can easily look at scalable resources, instead of being stuck with constantly underutilized capacities.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) forms another critical component of cloud infrastructure, including components such as a database, analytics, integration, mobile, security, etc., that can be consumed on-demand.  Not only is the approach time efficient, but these cloud stacks can also help with building the extensible platform needed to support strategic business outcomes by lowering entry barriers and accelerating the go-to-market.

The hybrid cloud platform – a CIO’s key to cloud success

Achieving successful outcomes from the cloud increasingly involves taking a hybrid approach to deployment. Organizations need to be able to utilize different forms of cloud solutions that can best cater to their requirements while simultaneously meeting regulatory benchmarks, including data governance and evolving security regulations in the markets that they operate in.

The financial services industry, for example, has specific rules about how data is collected, used and stored. Oracle Cloud at Customer helps organizations in the sector enjoy the benefits of a public cloud, while allowing them to stay in control of their data and where it is located.

The secret in the “sauce”

Today, several vendors offer cloud stacks and solutions. So, how can CIOs choose the right option for their business, especially in a rapidly changing market that is moving beyond the cloud to incorporate advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and automation?

This is giving rise to a whole new category of services. This new autonomous cloud is underpinned by three core tenets; being self-driving (where it literally runs itself, eliminating considerable human labor by self-tuning, self-patching, and self-scaling), self-securing (including intelligent threat detection, remediation and automatic encryption) and self-repairing (enabling the system to keep running even as patching and maintenance takes place).

This new cloud platform infrastructure has the potential to positively disrupt business models - enabling reduced risk, lower costs, and maximization of a business’ most important asset, their data. In the longer run, the resulting ‘autonomous organization’ has the potential to reach an ideal state where manual processes for running day-to-day operations and maintaining core IT systems can be completed without human interference. Instead, manpower can be redeployed toward value-added roles, enabling companies to redirect revenue and focus on innovating amid changing market dynamics.

The Journey Forward

Already we have moved far in the journey to the cloud. Some years ago, even established companies were wary of the cloud; today, cloud acceptance and adoption continues to grow.

Witnessing shifts within its business and customer demographics, driven by the rising tide of consumer e-commerce, Indonesia’s leading express logistics provider, JNE is introducing the Oracle Management Cloud to manage innovative applications, including a Business Reporting System for e-commerce customers. This enables end users to see where their items are at each stage of their journey and provide JNE with end-to-end visibility of all transactions to ensure performance and response times for deliveries.

Evidently, this new approach truly represents a new era of IT, where things are finally made simple, business leaders have a clear view of all applications and most importantly, glean actionable insights from data. Modern CIOs are now leading the charge in the way forward for their organizations with this new, enterprise-grade cloud that enables them to focus on supporting business strategy and leave the techie ‘how to’ to the cloud service providers.

In this new form, the cloud won’t just be ‘as a service’, but at your service – providing unprecedented access and ease of use to CIOs and their businesses. Cloud and other transformational technologies will be further demonstrated and discussed at Oracle OpenWorld Asia, the industry's most important business and technology conference, happening in Singapore from March 26 – 27. Registration is now open: https://www.oracle.com/sg/openworld/ 

This article is written by Chin Ying Loong, VP, Cloud Platform, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines 

Connecting the Dots, Connecting the Data: How Cloud Delivers Exceptional Customer Experiences

It takes months to find a customer and only seconds to lose one, or so the saying goes. These days, however, it might be more like milliseconds.

Thanks to on-demand information and services available anytime, anywhere, customers are more empowered than ever before and have sky-high expectations. If your customer is bored or impatient, confused or frustrated, for even just a second, there are a myriad of other choices they can turn to. Gartner predicts by 2020, poor customer experiences will destroy nearly a third of digital business projects, and PwC reports that 73% of customers now point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision.

In this context, providing a personalized, seamless, predictive customer experience is a core pillar of business success – and the only way to achieve that is by connecting every part of the enterprise and making sure customers are at the center of all decision-making.

Connection and integration help businesses answer that all-important question – how do I maintain a single view of my customer? The average consumer generates a huge amount of data every day, across a vast range of channels; and in fact, an estimated 90% of the data that now exists was created in the past two years. On social, mobile, desktop and connected TV, consumers are creating masses of data based on their interests, purchases, location and brand sentiment. But when all that data remained isolated in business silos, the view of the customer becomes fragmented.

Uniquely, cloud applications enable a single point of view on customer data. Through the cloud, businesses can tear down silos so that more customer data is collected and shared, in an open and usable way, with everyone in the organization. The integration extends from the frontlines of the business to help marketers create more personalized engagements, all the way to the back-office. Finally, data can be quickly and effectively used to streamline interlocking ERP processes across the supply chain, manufacturing, logistics and more, as well as to inform broader strategic initiatives.

Customer-centricity isn’t just about what customers can see – it’s a way an entire organization works that starts from the inside out. When the existing business environment is integrated and interoperable, without the perils of siloed technology and thinking, continual innovation is finally possible.

Bold organizations are setting an example of improving the customer experience at the front office and driving new innovation at the back office, to go above and beyond for customers in a competitive landscape. They’re doing this with investments in the cloud so that they can use data in a more robust and connected way.

ZALORA, the largest e-commerce fashion company in Southeast Asia, is an organization that illustrates how the right back-end system can drive new levels of customer loyalty. It was important for ZALORA to have a tool that helps them listen and respond in real-time to each personalized interaction with the customer, extracting the data that matters in customer interactions. With Oracle Marketing Cloud, ZALORA has moved from a batch and blast model to become an orchestrator of personalized conversations, where they are able to speak to customers in a relevant and tailored manner. Some of the benefits achieved by ZALORA from Oracle Marketing Cloud include the halving of time needed for a lead conversation to capture a large customer base, resulting in a multifold increase in revenue.

Eco-friendly pest control service, Killem Pest is another fantastic example of a company that is using the connective power of the cloud to provide the best customer experience. Through the Oracle Service Cloud, Killem Pest is able to collate requests from customers or potential new leads via a user-friendly portal, email or on the phone. This allows them to effectively manage to resource across scheduled assignments and locations in real time with their Oracle Field Service Cloud, and handle feedback in a proactive manner.

It’s a similar story for Australian airline Jetstar, which is currently leveraging the cloud to enact a company-wide transformation aimed at better engagement with customers on their own terms. A cloud data management platform is helping to provide a more robust, single view on customers so that the business can speak to them as individuals; in the right place and at the right time. Recently, teams were able to unite an email activity with display advertising in order to reach a disengaged customer segment. The result? A growth of up to 70 percent on incremental revenue.

Connected information is the fuel that drives customer-centricity. When businesses connect all the data and all the dots across the organization, they can deliver rich internal insight and provide truly excellent experiences for customers. The next wave of customer service is already here, bringing significantly enhanced experiences to customers and re-defining which companies will come out on top. 

New Culture of Work in PH Needed to Succeed in Digital Transformation

The changing face of the workforce in the Philippines has resulted in a need for organizations to foster a new culture of work to achieve digital transformation success, a Microsoft Study has concluded. In fact, half of the respondents polled felt that more can be done by their organizations to invest in culture development.

The Study found the following factors influencing the culture of work in the Philippines today:  

1.       Increasingly mobile workforce and exposure to new security risks: The rise of mobility and proliferation of mobile and cloud technologies have resulted in individuals working across multiple locations and devices. In fact, the Study found that only 21% of respondents are spending all of their work hours in the office, and 81% of respondents are working off personal smartphones. The latter raises new security challenges for organizations.

2.       The rise of diverse teams: The Study found that 29% of workers in the Philippines are already working in more than 10 teams at any one point in time. With the BPO industry being significant in the country, more workers are working with different and even virtual teams from different locations. This makes the availability of real-time insights and collaboration tools crucial to get work done.

3.       Gaps in employees’ digital skills even as leaders are in the motion of embracing digital transformation: As the bar is raised with new technologies adopted across industries, deployment is uneven. In fact, 47% of respondents feel that more can be done to bridge the digital skills gap among workers.

Said Cian O’Neill, Microsoft Philippines COO and CMO: “The rise of digital technologies, along with a new generation of millennials entering the workforce, has brought about a need to address changing workers’ expectations, knowledge and skills, as well as the tools they use. And with more than half of the world’s millennials residing in Asia, the workplace will need to transform to adapt to the technology habits of these digital natives. In addition, due to deployment of advanced and emerging technologies, organizations need to relook at reskilling its workforce to develop creative and strategic skills for the future.”

Addressing a new culture of work for digital transformation success

Even as 86% of business leaders in the Philippines acknowledge the need to transform into a digital business in order to succeed, people are ultimately the main drivers of digital transformation.

“People are at the heart of digital transformation. Their expectations, knowledge and skills, as well as the tools they use for work, are determining factors in the level of transformation that any organization can achieve. The challenge that they face now is how to implement new ways to foster a modern culture of work to better empower Asia’s workers, especially those at the frontline. By estimates, there are two billion firstline workers globally, and make up majority of our workforce today,” said Bertand Launay, Microsoft Philippines Managing Director.

Today, firstline workers serve as the first point of contact between companies and the rest of the world - first to engage customers, represent brand, and see products and services in action.

To unlock the potential of employees, organizations need to address and elevate their workforce, especially firstline workers, through addressing the core values of the new culture of work:

1.       Unlocking employees’ creativity

Collaboration fuels innovation through sharing of ideas and enables flexibility in how people work through a connected experience, while working seamlessly across devices. However, the Study found that majority of respondents feel restricted in the way they work today, with 64% highlighting that they needed to be physically present in office as equipment or tools used for their line of work is only available in the workplace.

2.       Fuelling teamwork

By equipping all workers with a universal toolkit for collaboration, organizations offer its people choice and ownership as to how they work together and collaborate in real-time. In fact, the Study found that one in two workers highlighted that access to technology for collaboration such that they can respond in a timely manner to internal and external requests was important in their line of work.

3.       Strengthening Security

Today, 74% of respondents are working on employer-issued PCs, but 81% are also working on personal smartphones, which underscores potential security risks. In fact, 76% of respondents admitted to checking personal emails on company-issued devices, and are doing so for convenience sake. Therefore, leaders need to strengthen their security not to put organization’s confidential data at risk to address the need for workers to work without barriers and without impeding productivity.

4.       Bringing Simplicity

With the rise of apps, devices, services and security risks in the workplace, there is a need to streamline the IT management, break down service siloes so that disparate data can be combined and reasoned in new ways and reduce complexity. In fact, a Microsoft Asia Pacific IT leaders study[2] found that 61% of ITDMs from the market agreed that there is a need to reduce complexity of managing their existing IT security portfolio.

Technology is key for firstline workers to become an integral part of digital transformation success

“We believe that every worker – from the factory floor to the front desk, to the executive boardroom – can contribute to an organization’s collective endeavours. It is our view that involving firstline workers in digital transformation will drive unprecedented opportunity – for workers, the organizations that they work for, and the industries and society at large,” added O’Neill.  “At Microsoft, we see the opportunities that can be unlocked with technology by equipping firstline workers with the right tools, such as Microsoft 365. Ultimately, digital transformation projects can only succeed if the right tools are in place for workers to leverage and maximize upon.”

Microsoft has announced the expansion of Microsoft 365, including Microsoft 365 F1, which provides purpose-built capabilities that help foster firstline culture and community, train and upskill employees, digitize business process, deliver real-time expertise, and minimize risk and cost. New intelligent search capabilities, a vision for intelligent communications centring on Microsoft Teams, and security and IT management enhancements to help customers stay secure and compliant were also introduced at Ignite:

·         Microsoft 365 F1 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security to empower the more than two billion firstline workers worldwide, who serve as the first point of contact between a company and its customers, or who are directly involved in making products.

·         Introducing a new vision for intelligent communications, including plans to bring Skype for Business Online capabilities into Microsoft Teams, along with cognitive and data services, making Teams the true hub for teamwork in Office 365, including persistent chat, voice and video.  

·         Intelligent search experiences use AI and machine learning to deliver more relevant search results everywhere you search across Microsoft 365

·         Microsoft 365 is delivering improved Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) features like enhanced anti-phishing capabilities, expanded protection to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams and integration between cloud and on premises identity threat detection capabilities.

Modernizing firstline workforce with Microsoft Cloud

For organizations still on Office 2007, end of support will happen on 11 October. Customers who are still using Office 2007 products and services are encouraged to move to Office 365 or Microsoft 365 to stay supported, and ensure uninterrupted support from Microsoft.

O’Neill said: “With cloud-based productivity tools being a key pick among Asia’s mobile workers to drive greater collaboration among teams, we urge organizations to take the opportunity to evaluate Microsoft 365 as an option to modernize their workforce.”

To learn more about Microsoft 365, visit https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-365

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About Microsoft

Microsoft is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more

Microsoft Philippines, the local subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation, has been constantly bringing innovation and making its technology available to Filipino businesses and individuals since 1995. As a committed and trusted partner in nation-building, Microsoft Philippines has made it its mission to fuel growth and healthy communities, as well as transform locally-based businesses and empower them to compete in the global economy.

*This is Press Release