Technology key to business survival, stability

SAN FRANCISCO: Mark Hurd, CEO Oracle, on Tuesday predicted that by 2025, about 100 percent of application development and testing would be conducted in the cloud, around 80 percent of production apps would be in the cloud, while the same percentage of information technology (IT) budgets would be spent on cloud services. 

“More will be spent on business innovation and little on system maintenance,
all the enterprise data will be stored in the cloud, and the enterprise clouds will be the most secure place for IT processing,” Hurd said while keynoting Oracle OpenWorld 2017, an annual Oracle convention for business decision-makers, IT management, and line-of-business end users. 

Hurd, who was also joined by Bloom Energy, FedEx, and Gap, on stage to share how cloud innovations are making their businesses more agile, efficient, and profitable, further said the dynamics of doing business will be changing in the years to follow. 

Cloud or cloud computing is the delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics over the Internet or the cloud for that matter. It cuts the cost of buying hardware and software and setting up datacenters and even maintain a team of IT experts. Cloud is highly cost-effective because the businesses have arrangements according to pay-as-you-use policy with service providers.

Besides, cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business
continuity easier and less expensive, because data can be mirrored at multiple sites on the provider’s network.

Later on, answering a question during a ‘meet the press’ session, Hurd said now company’s cloud solutions are very much affordable and within the reach of small companies and start-ups.

“The emerging technologies have been put into use to make businesses efficient and result-oriented and improve customer experience,” Hurd said.  For example, he said, adaptive intelligent apps were powered by insights from the Oracle Data Cloud, which was the largest third-party data marketplace in the world with a collection of more than five billion global consumer and business IDs and more than 7.5 trillion data points collected monthly. 

“By applying advanced data science and machine learning to Oracle’s web-scale data and an organisation’s own data, the new adaptive intelligent apps can react, learn, and adapt in real time based on historical and dynamic customer data,” the Oracle chief said.

Similarly, in terms of managing human resource, Hurd said that new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities help improve talent management, provide complete workforce insights, and increase operational efficiency.

“By applying natural language search and deep learning technologies to resumes and job postings, human resource professionals are able to find and source the best candidates,” he said and added they also can determine the likelihood of success and longevity by using insights from previous recruitment engagements and current job indicators, such as sales achievement or performance ratings.

Furthermore, he said that company has developed intelligent bots that use deep learning-based natural language understanding (NLU) to comprehend and determine intent of end-user conversations. “This can then help companies process these conversations, integrate each with existing business application data, and automatically respond,” Hurd said.