Oracle: Cloud Success Relies On Cultural Shift
As some organisations continue to struggle with cloud, Oracle changes the way it sells the stuff
Up to half of European organisations are struggling with the shift to cloud infrastructure, confused by data silos and wrestling with cloud integrations costs.
This is according to Oracle, which claims that the befuddlement is down to a majority of companies’ overall IT spend being driven by individual business units versus traditional IT departments, making it difficult for organisations to fully benefit from the cloud services they’re subscribing too.
Another part of the problem, claims Oracle, is that most organisations are continuing to fund their IT investments without aligning to revenue potential.
Cultural transformation
These claims are from Oracle’s ‘Putting Cultural Transformation at the Heart of Cloud Success’ report.
The findings reveal businesses should rethink their IT funding models and undergo a cultural transformation in order to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing.
One third of respondents said an inappropriate IT funding model is inhibiting their business. One third also believe their company’s IT culture is unfit for the cloud computing age.
TechWeekEurope spoke to John Abel, senior business director at Oracle EMEA, who said that the cultural shift is also being mirrored internally at the company.
“We’re having to really reconnect back with the developer. I think it’s fair to say that many of the conversations I have are with the developer community. Also, in that conversation, the way we’re having to culturally think at Oracle has changed. So one of the big aspects is there’s quite a cultural shift in the way we articulate our cloud offerings,” he said.
So, where we would have been speaking before with a product-centric view, talking about new features, but the Oracle culture is now changing into more consultative-based selling.
“So what you’re seeing is us having to be much more involved in the aspects and business outcomes [of cloud]. Much of my conversations now are around how we accelerate the business to business outcomes. That cultural shift is probably the biggest change I’ve seen, not only in the industry but in Oracle too.”
Abel explained how sale and business development have been amalgamated at Oracle, helping customers better understand their cloud.
“The reason we did that is to take the best concepts of devops and bring them into the sales phase,” said Abel.
“Before cloud I wouldn’t have done that, because the average cycle of a product launch was around 12 months. But with cloud, we can now use devsale to go from product initiation to the point where we’ve got a sales consultant talking to a customer in about 12 weeks. Before this year, I’d have never believed that I would have to do it that quick. It’s refreshing. I’m not saying we’re complete, but we’re on that journey.”
