In the age of cloud computing and borderless workflow, enterprise IT is under going a seismic shift to accommodate the needs of the modern worker while enabling business-wide flexibility and responsiveness through technology integration.
In a new report from Oracle titled “The Era I Enterprise: Ready for Anything” , the software giant polled some C-level executives across a wide range of North American sectors to gather a snapshot of enterprise needs.
According to the company, “The digital age is turning convention on its head as we increasingly expect—and even demand—to have it our way, whether transacting, communicating, working, or simply enjoying leisure time. Welcome to Era I, the age of the individual…What does this mean for enterprises? Organizations must be ready and able to turn on a dime and deliver content, experiences, services, and technology to individuals however and wherever they desire. So how are the enterprises doing?”
Here are the key findings articulated in Oracle’s report:
- 84% say their organization has experienced a trend toward customers wanting a more individualized experience, and 70% have experienced this trend with employees.
- Most organizations are unprepared. Today fewer than one in five C-level executives give their organization an “A” in its ability to offer highly individualized customer or employee experiences.
- Individualization and agility are key to revenue growth. Organizations say business intelligence tools, customer experience solutions, and other industry-specific applications will play a vital role.
- Additionally, 81 percent believe there is an important link between cloud-based IT solutions and their organization’s ability to deliver individualized employee and customer experiences.
Bobby Srinivasan, CEO of Mobileum, commented on how communications service providers, particularly, are having to quickly turn to a customer-centric approach to stay afloat in a highly competitive market.
“Approaches now focus on methods like customer journey mapping and data driven services and products, rather than relying on the tried and tested days of voice and data services,” he said. “Other industries have paved the way to online success, such as Amazon.com and Google, who have been quick to illustrate that the key to digital success lies in a customer-centric approach and that in order to keep up and be a competitor of note, CSPs are going to have to make the transition from a legacy CSP to a proficient digital service provider.”
This idea of individualization is covered in the Oracle report findings and extends beyond enterprise customers to the actual enterprise workforce. From the report: “Organizations estimate that if they were able to successfully offer customers and employees a highly individualized experience, they would earn an additional 18% in annual revenue. To get there, organizations say business intelligence tools, customer experience solutions and other industry-specific applications will play a vital role. Additionally, 81% believe there is an important link between cloud-based IT solutions and their organization’s ability to deliver individualized employee and customer experiences.”
Specific to the communications sector, Oracle found, based on conversations with executives, that 20% rated the ability to offer highly individualized customer experiences at a C or below. Communications leaders surveyed said their biggest struggle is the ability to “turn on a dime.”
Oracle’s emphasis on the flexibility and agility that come with big data analytics and cloud-computing platforms is indicative of a larger trend toward cloud-as-a-service offerings targeting the enterprise space.
Faced with the ever-increasing need to cut costs and boost revenues, many enterprises are turning to digitalization strategies focused on using cloud computing platforms and attendant data analytics functions to gain efficiency and insight relative to business operations.
But, deploying a cloud infrastructure, in addition to being a highly complex, difficult process, also costs a lot of money. That’s why many cloud players are launching cloud-as-a-service models to reach new enterprise clients. Like with the whole as-a-service movement, the idea is to outsource the infrastructure investment and maintenance to the experts, while still getting all the benefits.
Take a look at what heavyweight Rackspace is doing in this arena. The San Antonio-based company this week launched a service designed to allow companies to deploy a fully managed private cloud in any data center anywhere in the world.
“By delivering OpenStack everywhere, the new integrated, software, hardware and services solution can answer CIO demand for managed services for private cloud on their own terms – meeting customers at every step of their cloud journey whether it is in a customer or third-party data center, a Rackspace-support third-party colocation facility or a Rackspace data center,” the company noted.
