Oracle: Focus on simplicity

John Abel, vice president, cloud and technology, UK & Ireland at Oracle tells the audience at Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure Live event that the cloud won't fix certain types of problem

UK-based firms are insufficiently focused on simplicity, and that blocks some of the value they could get from their cloud investment.

That's the view of John Abel, vice president, cloud and technology, UK & Ireland at Oracle speaking at Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure Live event in Central London.

"We don't focus enough on simplicity," began Abel. "People think they'll go to the cloud and it'll resolve all their problems. But say if you use IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service] and it's not optimised in your data centre, it won't be optimised in the cloud either.

"Just shifting it from a room to a virtual location won't make any difference. You have to get your house sorted first."

He then referenced a customer who implemented a digital strategy without first ensuring their processes were in shape.

"One customer agreed a digital strategy, and created a new omni-channel for consumers. It was a big success. But they never sorted out their back office, so once they went to a digital channel, their billing and fulfillment processes were unable to scale.

"They dumped it into their cloud provider and it didn't scale there ether," he added.

Abel explained that businesses need to understand and simplify what they need, or risk being outcompeted by a more nimble rival.

"Look at your own industries, if you don't simplify what you need to own versus what you can give up, you'll be challenged by someone outside your industry.

"Amazon was a bookshop, but you could see by their DNA that they're really a services company. You have to give up technology ownership at some point. Unless it's your core business you need to challenge yourself and ask if you really need to run something yourself."