Here’s why I think these four developments are so vital:
The rise of the end-to-end cloud: Business leaders are tired of buying point solutions from boutique vendors only to spend staggering amounts of time and money to integrate all those disparate pieces of technology. In too many cases, the result has been inflexible systems that can’t be adapted rapidly to meet changing business requirements. Plus, as those systems continue to be cobbled together with mismatched components, technologies, and code, the underlying complexity becomes a drain on the business and an obstacle to innovation. In the new end-to-end cloud model, CEOs have the option to deploy a suite of applications with common interfaces and underlying software, which allows those businesses to roll out upgrades simply and seamlessly to keep pace not only with customer demands but also with marketplace opportunities. And in today’s frenetic and always-on global economy, those capabilities can translate into massive competitive advantage.
Redefining “mission-critical.” New SaaS-based marketing-automation tools, in both the B2B and B2C sectors, give CMOs vastly greater insights into the behaviors and tendencies of prospects. This enables businesses to directly tie marketing activities to revenue generation. On top of that, by tying in these marketing-automation tools with modern CRM systems, businesses can optimize their engagements with customers across the entire spectrum: social channels, marketing campaigns, commerce sites, sales, and service. For the first time, marketers can synchronize and optimize their campaigns across all the various customer touchpoints that traditionally have been fragmented and disjointed: web, mobile, social, in-store, contact center, field service, direct sales, and channel sales.
In addition, look at the ongoing battle for talent in the workplace today, particularly since anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of the US workforce will be eligible to retire over the next several years. With that type of rapidly changing workforce, and with the equally turbulent shifts in how customers are demanding to do business with sellers, companies simply can’t afford to rely on twentieth- century approaches in today’s hypercompetitive recruiting environment. Today, it is the world-class worker who does the interviewing, notthe company looking to make the hire—and that means CEOs and CHROs need world-class HR and HCM systems to guide those employees from recruitment to retirement. Again, today’s modern SaaS applications give companies an unprecedented opportunity to redefine what processes are mission-critical—and recruiting and retaining the very best employees certainly fits that new definition.
Driving transformation. Businesses in every industry are struggling to keep pace with today’s blistering pace of change, and in every case that involves a new approach to changing, accelerating, and optimizing business processes. Traditional enterprise applications were never intended to meet this need—they were written before the web, before social, before mobile, and before big data and analytics were essential elements of everyday work. And just as the shift to cloud-based infrastructure and platforms liberates big chunks of IT budgets that have been trapped in low-value server farms and integration projects, so too can modern SaaS applications help companies align new processes with the very different behaviors and preferences of customers. That speed of innovation—it could also be called shorter time to customer value—is the result of new SaaS features being implemented at a pace never before seen in enterprise applications. We’re rolling out several hundred new customer-centric features per release, and we’re doing three of these SaaS upgrade releases per year. The traditional on-premises model could never come close to that speed of innovation—meaning that businesses win, their customers win, and Oracle wins as a result of our customers’ successes.
Unleashing financial insights. More and more CEOs and CFOs are getting comfortable with moving their ERP processes, including finance, to the cloud to allow for seamless connectedness with manufacturing, purchasing, design, supply chain, project-management, and more. In a similar fashion, more and more business leaders are making enterprise performance management (EPM) a top-level initiative to help their companies strategically track daily operations and outcomes to longer-term financial planning and objectives. A few years ago, this would have been considered a pipe dream, but in our rapidly changing world, many businesses are making cloud-based EPM an indispensable part of their daily operations.
These four emerging developments are sure to be disruptive. If it hasn’t already arrived within your industry and among your competitors, digital disruption will surely be coming to your business environment—and soon. I believe that the companies that will thrive in this new world of digital disruption—not just survive—will be those that embrace cloud computing and SaaS applications as a way to accelerate operations, engage with customers more intimately, find and dazzle great talent, and become the joyful disruptors rather than the paralyzed disruptees.
By Mark V. Hurd