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More than half of the 1,000 participants in a study by Oracle admit their IT organisations are unprepared for the competitive threat of moving to the cloud, including competitors’ ability to launch new applications faster.

The report, which looked at large enterprises in EMEA, also uncovers inadequacies in terms of how platform as a service (PaaS) offerings are being leveraged for business agility. 59% of those polled said their businesses either do not or cannot know whether they can shift workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds.

When it comes to developing, testing and deploying new enterprise apps on mobile, almost three quarters (73%) of respondents are not agile enough to iterate within one month. Worryingly, more than half (56%) cannot do this within six months.

Despite this, almost two thirds (62%) of respondents believe their company is agile, and that it can iterate products and services quickly, while more than three quarters (78%) said the ability to rapidly develop new business applications is either ‘important’ or ‘critically important’ to the success of their business. Furthermore, 30% of those polled argue the effective mobilisation of applications and services is the deciding factor for business success through IT infrastructure.

Naturally, the Oracle survey results come alongside a push towards its Oracle Cloud Platform kit, which gets a mention in dispatches. Yet Tino Scholman, vice president EMEA of Oracle Cloud, argues businesses need to do more. “There is something of an awareness gap emerging around how businesses can become more agile,” he said. “While some companies already view themselves as agile, most of these are not yet able to realise the power of PaaS solutions to help them launch new services quickly.”

He added: “If you want to become more innovative and experiment more often, then you have to make sure your cost of innovation goes down and goes down quickly. We want to help bridge this awareness gap by showing businesses how the right cloud platform solution can enable them to react almost immediately to market conditions and get well ahead of the competition.”

One of the great challenges of cloud computing is the seemingly endless possibilities it provides.
Yes, you read that right. The perceived infiniteness of the cloud is both an asset and a challenge, especially when it comes to the healthcare industry. With its strict regulations regarding privacy (i.e., HIPAA), healthcare organizations have been timid (and slow, in comparison to other industries) to adopt cloud computing efforts.
Yet, cloud computing done right is changing the way healthcare organizations operate and facilitating many providers’ goal of delivering a patient-centric experience.
Leveraging the power of the cloud starts with choosing the right partners and tools. Implementation of cloud services doesn’t have to be an all-in scenario; in fact, there are relatively easy ways organizations can start harnessing the power of the cloud. From public, private or hybrid cloud to healthcare-specific software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, there are options out there to consider.

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IBM’s Blue Box Cloud, powered by OpenStack, is now available in any of IBM’s globally integrated cloud data centers running SoftLayer infrastructure.
Less than 90 days after its acquisition of Blue Box, IBM has integrated its Blue Box Cloud Dedicated private-cloud-as-a-service into its broader portfolio of OpenStack® based solutions. The announcement, made today at the OpenStack Silicon Valley event, further highlights IBM’s continued support to deliver OpenStack solutions across all cloud deployment models—public, private and hybrid.

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Brands are more than the sum of their brand elements – logos, colors, shapes, and the like. Brands are promises. Promises from a company to its customers that its products will deliver the value and experience customers expect.
Today, digital is transforming enterprises across numerous industries. As companies become software-driven organizations, their brands transform into digital brands. But if brands are promises, then what do digital brands promise – and how do those promises differ from traditional, non-digital brands?

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Too often with compelling new technologies market participants become overly enamored with that attractiveness of the technology and neglect underlying business drivers. This tendency, what some call the “newest shiny object syndrome,” is understandable given that virtually all of us are heavily engaged in technology. But it is also mistaken. Without concrete business cases driving its deployment, IoT, like many other technologies before it, will fade into obscurity.

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In 2011, then United States CIO Vivek Kundra released the US Federal Cloud Computing Strategy [1]. In the executive summary he pointed to cloud computing as a key component of the US Federal Government’s information technology modernization efforts:
“Cloud computing has the potential to play a major part in addressing these inefficiencies and improving government service delivery. The cloud computing model can significantly help agencies grappling with the need to provide highly reliable, innovative services quickly despite resource constraints.”

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