‘Cloud computing on the rise in Pakistan’

KARACHI: Cloud computing is providing cheaper and cost effective efficient automation, data management, analysis and services to the businesses globally and this trend is gradually increasing in Pakistan, said Waqas Hashmi Country Sales Director, Pakistan & Afghanistan Technology Business Oracle Corporation while briefing media.
Increasingly, organizations are finding that by using cloud-based platform offerings called platform as a service (PaaS) to develop and deploy applications, they can eliminate the cost and complexity of managing the underlying application platforms.
“Businesses that use PaaS have reported operational savings of up to 50 percent,” he added.
Not only the large enterprises including banking and telecom sector are utilizing cloud computing but other traditional sectors including textiles, logistics, other manufacturing sectors, SMEs and startup businesses are also adapting to new technologies in Pakistan, Hashmi said.
While talking about Pakistan, he said, “It is certainly a cost conscious market and customers and users require cost effective products,” adding, “However, Pakistani customers and users are eager and ready to adapt any new technology as far as IT maturity is concerned.”
Similarly, on SME level, this trend is also increasing and one example is the online retailing, which was not known to Pakistani market a few years back, however, the trend is increasing rapidly and many products are being retailed online. There is a demand for it from supplier side and also from the consumer side, Hashmi added.
He said despite the increasing numbers of users of Cloud computing, there is still a huge gap to bring all the SMEs on the cloud.
Small and medium as well as large enterprises in Pakistan can automate their processes using the best available IT platforms without spending much with pay-as-you-grow subscription model for Oracle Cloud Platform. Innovation, business agility, a better customer experience, the potential benefits of cloud have made it a key component in enterprise IT strategy, with more than 90 percent of companies adopting cloud computing to some degree.
“Industry leaders are 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,” he said.
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 added.
“With Oracle Cloud Platform, organizations 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,” said Waqas Hashmi.
“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,” said Waqas.
While sharing numbers, Hashmi claimed that 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 centres around the world.