I brush the dust off the screen, hold my breath, flip the power switch, and a pause… the next moment will either reconnect me to an endless summer of misspent youth, or leave me continuing to seek some reattachment to a time now passed…“dah dah da da da DAH!” the sweet sound and the green welcoming glow of the Astro Wars screen - for a moment the World seems simple again.
Long gone is the era of green screens, dot matrixes, tape recorder data, and simple shoot 'em up games. Replaced now with Retina displays, 3D printers, and mobile apps. In 15 years all of these things will be equally obsolete – which is half the time it took the last lot of stuff to become obsolete relics! Never fear, the geek force is with us, and will battle on even though we know that the gadget attachment won't last like it used to.
Our technology fix has become a bottomless pit of hungry consumption. Everything always needs more. More processing, more power, more capacity, more features… and faster too. In the world of IT organizations, to keep up with demand, means being in a constant buying cycle, much like consumers but on a larger scale of geekdom. More servers, more racks, more space, more cables, more memory, more applications...
However, as a student of the Kermit the frog academy, I learned early on that “more and more of them, is less and less of me” especially in a disruptive consumption environment. More things to fix, more things to manage, more things to backup, more things to recover, more things to connect… Less time to innovate, less time to plan, less time to prepare, less time to enable, less time to scale…
The consumer-driven Customer Experience trends of Mobile, Data, Connectivity and sharing are driving more demand on IT than ever before. The social exposure, mandated governance, customer data security and Customer Experience strategies add to the burden of supporting deeper and more connected engagements from the business. More experiences to support means more technology investment is needed, resulting in even fewer resources to scale.
IT organizations must innovate not only to help the business differentiate, but also to enable themselves to scale resources to meet the increasing velocity of demand and change:
- 250+ Experiences per second
- 200+ Terabytes of customer data
- 40+ Billion total API operations
- 2+ Billion end-user sessions
- 6+ Billion page hits
- 400 Million keyword searches
- 450 Million new incidents
- 1 Billion Outreach & Feedback emails sent
- 50 Million Social Monitor actions
Okay, so these numbers aren’t representative of the types of metric thresholds that most businesses will need to meet today. But they are metrics drawn from what one arms of the Oracle Cloud around Customer Service, that must scale beyond these figures to support their customers' customers' scale of experience. Yet they do it with ease, as the Oracle Cloud was designed from the ground (the database and hardware) up (the applications) to work within world-class data centers and leading Cloud computing IT talent to handle massive loads and fluctuations.
Innovative decisions like moving the mission-critical business process such as customer engagements to the Cloud, enables IT organizations to leverage the real benefit of Cloud… innovation. Why? Because the parts of your business that are today focused on sustaining 24x7 operations for the customers experience can be the most taxing on your IT resources. Freeing up these savvy, dedicated, senior technical resources to prioritize innovative initiatives can take your business growth out of a “running to stand still” mode, into a differentiated leadership position, and at less cost.
Dipping a toe into the pool of the Cloud with non-mission critical or less resource intensive cloud migration initiatives can actually cause a higher IT resource tax without careful planning. Stop the factor of More becoming a fact of Less in your ability to execute. Discover how the Oracle SaaS applications within the Oracle Cloud can help balance the scales, with managed compliance, redundancy, security and elastic scalability.