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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.”