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Software giant Oracle has made a series of announcements at its Oracle CloudWorld event in New York, with the standout being the launch of three new cloud regions including the UK.

The new regions, in Virginia, London, and Turkey to be more precise, are expected to go live by the middle of 2017, while the company adds it expects further regions, in APAC, the Middle East, and North America, to be launched a year later.

Oracle adds that the new regions will comprise at least three high bandwidth, low latency sites – for which the company code is ‘availability domains’ – located several miles from each other and designed to be built to avoid failover.

Back in September, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison spoke of these fledgling next-generation data centres to delegates at their OpenWorld event. “We have a modern architecture for infrastructure where there’s no single point of failure,” he said. “Faults are isolated, therefore faults are tolerated. If we lose the data centre, then you won’t even know about it.” At the time, Ellison told delegates that “Amazon’s lead is over” in infrastructure as a service.

“Oracle is committed to building the most differentiated cloud platform that delivers on the requirements of a wide array of customer workloads,” said Deepak Patil, vice president of development at Oracle Cloud Platform in a statement. “This regional expansion underscores our commitment to making the engineering and capital investments required to continue to be a global large scale cloud platform leader.”

Elsewhere, the company announced expansions of Oracle Cloud Platform with what was described as an industry first. The Oracle Database Cloud Service is now available on bare metal compute, as well as new virtual machine, compute, load balancing, and storage capabilities for the platform. Oracle says its Database Cloud Service is perfect for development, testing, and deployment of enterprise workloads, while the advancements to the overall platform gives it ‘differentiated database performance at every scale, and deeply integrated IaaS capabilities for customers of any size’.

“These latest investments in the Oracle Cloud Platform provide a clear path to develop, test, and scale applications – with the Oracle Database or third-party databases,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development. “We offer customers the most comprehensive approach to moving to the cloud and accelerating their business strategies.”

In November, a study from Oracle argued various barriers remain for an enterprise IT cloud model to succeed, with proving return on investment and discord between infrastructures the key stumbling blocks.

GovCloud Network is proud to have served as the Program Manager for the NATO Allied Command Transformation, “Art of the Possible” Interoperability Demonstration on December 16, 2016. supporting the The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC), this effort featured an important demonstration for military, government and business leaders by its member-companies to underscore the benefits of collaborating via an interoperable network environment. The demonstration used a secure, federated-cloud infrastructure to highlight the consortium’s work over the past few years in how to develop a trusted environment, including governance processes and federation management as well as interoperability verification.

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Over the past few years, IT service management (ITSM) has become increasingly important to an organization’s IT strategy, and companies are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency via better ITSM processes. This increases the importance of tracking and measuring critical KPIs.
However, due to overwhelmingly large amounts of data, users find it challenging to manually access, track and analyze critical help desk information quickly. Using advanced IT analytics, managers can identify blind spots and hidden gaps in their ITSM process as well as make accurate decisions by monitoring key metrics.

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Picture credit: SAP

The more integrated the systems are supporting any selling strategy, the greater the chances sales will increase. That’s because accuracy, speed, and quality of every quote matter more than ever. Being able to strengthen every customer interaction with insight and intelligence often means the difference between successful upsells, cross-sells and the chance to bid and win new projects. Defining a roadmap to enrich selling strategies using SAP integration is delivering results across a variety of manufacturing and service industries today.

Getting more value out of the customer data locked in legacy SAP systems can improve selling results starting with existing sales cycles. Knowing what each customer purchased, when, at what price, and for which project or location is invaluable in accelerating sales cycles today. There are many ways to improve selling results using SAP integration, and the following are the top three based on conversations with SAP Architects, CIOs and IT Directors working with Sales Operations to improve selling results. These five approaches are generating more leads, closing more deals, leading to better selling decisions and improving sales productivity.

Three ways SAP integration is improving selling results

• Reducing and eliminating significant gaps in the Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) process by integrating Salesforce and SAP systems improves selling and revenue results quickly. The following two illustrations compare how much time and revenue escape from the selling process. It’s common to see companies lose at least 20% of their orders when they rely on manual approaches to handling quotes, pricing, and configurations. The greater the complexity of the deal is the more potential for lost revenue.  The second graphic shows how greater system integration leads to lower costs to complete an order, cycle time reductions, order rework reductions, and lead times for entire orders dropping from 69 to 22 days.

• Having customer order history, pricing, discounts and previously purchased bundles stored in SAP ERP systems integrated into Salesforce will drive better decisions on which customers are most likely to buy upsells, cross-sells and new products when. Instead of having just to rely on current activity with a given customer, sales teams can analyze sales history to find potential purchasing trends and indications of who can sign off on deals in progress. Having real-time access to SAP data within Salesforce gives sales teams the most valuable competitive advantage there is, which is more time to focus on customers and closing deals.  enosiX is taking a leadership role in the area of real-time SAP to Salesforce integration, enabling enterprises to sell and operate more effectively.
• Improving sales operations and customer service productivity by providing customer data in real-time via Salesforce to support teams on a 24/7 basis worldwide. The two departments who rely on customer data more than sales need to have real-time access to customer data on a 24/7 basis from any device at any time, on a global scale. By integrating customer data held today in SAP ERP and related systems to Salesforce, Sales Operations, and Customer Service will have the visibility they’ve never had before. And that will translate into faster response times, higher customer satisfaction and potentially more sales too.

Picture credit: SAP

The more integrated the systems are supporting any selling strategy, the greater the chances sales will increase. That’s because accuracy, speed, and quality of every quote matter more than ever. Being able to strengthen every customer interaction with insight and intelligence often means the difference between successful upsells, cross-sells and the chance to bid and win new projects. Defining a roadmap to enrich selling strategies using SAP integration is delivering results across a variety of manufacturing and service industries today.

Getting more value out of the customer data locked in legacy SAP systems can improve selling results starting with existing sales cycles. Knowing what each customer purchased, when, at what price, and for which project or location is invaluable in accelerating sales cycles today. There are many ways to improve selling results using SAP integration, and the following are the top three based on conversations with SAP Architects, CIOs and IT Directors working with Sales Operations to improve selling results. These five approaches are generating more leads, closing more deals, leading to better selling decisions and improving sales productivity.

Three ways SAP integration is improving selling results

• Reducing and eliminating significant gaps in the Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) process by integrating Salesforce and SAP systems improves selling and revenue results quickly. The following two illustrations compare how much time and revenue escape from the selling process. It’s common to see companies lose at least 20% of their orders when they rely on manual approaches to handling quotes, pricing, and configurations. The greater the complexity of the deal is the more potential for lost revenue.  The second graphic shows how greater system integration leads to lower costs to complete an order, cycle time reductions, order rework reductions, and lead times for entire orders dropping from 69 to 22 days.

• Having customer order history, pricing, discounts and previously purchased bundles stored in SAP ERP systems integrated into Salesforce will drive better decisions on which customers are most likely to buy upsells, cross-sells and new products when. Instead of having just to rely on current activity with a given customer, sales teams can analyze sales history to find potential purchasing trends and indications of who can sign off on deals in progress. Having real-time access to SAP data within Salesforce gives sales teams the most valuable competitive advantage there is, which is more time to focus on customers and closing deals.  enosiX is taking a leadership role in the area of real-time SAP to Salesforce integration, enabling enterprises to sell and operate more effectively.
• Improving sales operations and customer service productivity by providing customer data in real-time via Salesforce to support teams on a 24/7 basis worldwide. The two departments who rely on customer data more than sales need to have real-time access to customer data on a 24/7 basis from any device at any time, on a global scale. By integrating customer data held today in SAP ERP and related systems to Salesforce, Sales Operations, and Customer Service will have the visibility they’ve never had before. And that will translate into faster response times, higher customer satisfaction and potentially more sales too.

When you focus on a journey from up-close, you look at your own technical and cultural history and how you changed it for the benefit of the customer. This was our starting point: too many integration issues, 13 SWP days and very long cycles. It was evident that in this fast-paced industry we could no longer afford this reality. We needed something that would take us beyond reducing the development lifecycles, CI and Agile methodologies. We made a fundamental difference, even changed our culture.

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Enterprises are rapidly implementing private clouds for sound business reasons. Private clouds offer greater agility, enabling companies to quickly adapt to constantly changing business needs and innovate faster than competition. Digital and cloud services can be provided to developers at a pace of innovation that equals any public cloud. Companies can maintain security and compliance, along with the reliability, availability and stability of IT systems of large enterprises. Private clouds also provide better SLAs for new services than most public clouds offer.

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From improved diagnosing to enhanced treatment methodologies for a multitude of illnesses and diseases, the healthcare industry has benefited tremendously over the past decade thanks to advancements in technology. One of the most notable improvements has come about as the result of cloud technology – an increased ability to provide healthcare to remote populations.

In India, approximately 70% of the population lives in villages, many of which have limited access to healthcare providers, if any. Thankfully though, health technology specialists are tapping into the $125bn healthcare market and creating cloud-based equipment, such as all-flash storage arrays, and solutions that provide point of care diagnostic abilities along with telemedicine antidotes. These digital health breakthroughs are empowering more than 8,000 healthcare technicians to serve as proctors for physicians in rural areas.

When data is shared through cloud-based health programs, it enables health workers, including physicians, nurses, and health technician specialists, to link their data through shared networks located at central medical facilities. The data can be integrated into today’s most accurate diagnostic systems, allowing extremely effective medical objectives and treatment methods to be developed and implemented.

A cloud-based healthcare program proves to be of benefit because it operates within a large pool of unique, easily accessible useable resources that are virtualised. The resources have the ability to be dynamically reconfigured so that they are able to adjust to a variable scale, or load, which then provides users of the program to perform optimum utilisation of the resources stored in the cloud pool.

As with any type of healthcare solution, there are challenges that must be appropriately addressed. Cloud-based computing, especially within the healthcare field, requires lots of maintenance and training. Physicians and healthcare technicians must not only know how to utilise cloud-based software programs and equipment, but owners of healthcare clinics and medical centres must also address all legal issues that coincide with using cloud-based technology.

One program which is cloud-based and increasing healthcare to remote populations is ReMeDi. This program provides a unique form of video and audio capabilities between physicians and patients located in rural areas. The video and audio features allow real-time consultations to take place, which can be critical and even life-saving in some situations.

Take, for example, a patient who arrives at a village centre. A health technician takes vitals and performs basic diagnostic testing, followed then by adding the data and information to an electronic health record. The information is then shared via the appropriate cloud-based healthcare program and viewed by an offsite physician; this physician can quickly create a treatment plan, as well as prescribe any medications that may be needed to fight off a deadly infection.

Systematic innovation has always been a major factor in the development of advanced healthcare. Innovation drives cost-effectiveness as well as efficiency and high quality resolutions to today’s healthcare concerns. Cloud-based technology is proving to be a breakthrough in modern healthcare tactics, allowing research outcomes to be greatly improved, thus changing the face of IT. Data handling problems, coupled with complex and even sometimes unavailable or expensive computational methods have always resulted in research complications, especially within the biomedical research field. Cloud-based programs, though, are showing a lot of potential in being able to overcome these hurdles.

Read more: Why the healthcare industry’s move to cloud computing is accelerating