Covid-19 paves way for rapid growth of cloud computing

“Banking businesses are visible early adopters of digital transformation. But now many others have found that adopting digital transformation is no longer optional, but a must,” said Taveesak Saengthong, managing director of Oracle Corporation (Thailand) Co Ltd.

Taveesak cited as an example a family-run SME business that was having difficulty managing inventory. Management is an essential component of a well-functioning supply chain.

Excess inventory consumes capital and increases the risk of stock becoming obsolete, whereas insufficient inventory has a negative impact on customer service.

“The company is in the exporting business with dealers in different locations. During the Covid lockdown, they needed to manage inventory costs, but the stocks were all over the place,” he said.

Oracle Corporation (Thailand) was founded in December 1990, and provides database, tool, and application products. The company has developed innovations for cloud computing that speed up migration, provide greater stability and performance for all applications, and provide customers with all the resources.

They provide cutting-edge cloud applications with many services, such as Oracle cloud infrastructure (IaaS), Oracle cloud applications (SaaS), Oracle cloud platform (PaaS), and Oracle data cloud (DaaS).

The impact of cloud computing on the global economy is growing. According to IT research and consultancy company Gartner, as the effects of Covid-19 linger and businesses look to lay a foundation for increased agility and resilience, cloud demand and adoption in the Asia Pacific are expected to surge.

Overall cloud spending in the region is expected to reach US$200 billion by 2024. Spending on cloud services in Thailand is expected to reach 40.8 billion baht in 2022, representing a 36.6 per cent increase year on year.

The company is the only brand in the market to offer developers and business users workloads that are seamless and that satisfy their server, storage, application, and network requirements, Taveesak said.

With the cloud computing market expanding rapidly, vendors such as IBM, Google, Oracle, and Amazon have been catching up quickly.

Oracle has joined the market's biggest players, which has also aided Oracle's entry into the healthcare business. It has acquired Cerner, the developer of Electronic Health Record (EHR) software that is used to manage hospital patient data.

 

As one of the major developers of EHR in the market, Oracle plans to integrate its own Voice Digital Assistant with Cerner's software to make it easy to use and give doctors quick access to patient data. It is also preparing to launch EHR software on the public cloud.

On January 27, 2010, Oracle Corporation completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which had only been a software vendor prior to the merger. It now owns both of Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, and Sun's software product lines, including the Java programming language.

“Oracle usually acquires new businesses, literally every month in a year. The acquisition of Sun Microsystems helped support our enterprise systems. For example, a customer may take nine hours to run a system, which will now take only 1.4 hours. That means a huge cost-saving,” said Taveesak.

Oracle's challenge is to provide its customers with specific technologies that enable them to achieve their commercial goals through their newly acquired abilities to use the cloud computing service, he said.

As a result of this encouragement and opportunity, Oracle customers have made a long-lasting positive impact on both industries and communities, he added.

According to Taveesak, retail is the Thai business sector that will use cloud computing the most. Oracle has volunteered to help businesses operate without worrying about investment due to the need to adapt to its customers in the new normal era.

Recently, CP Group decided to use AI by utilising Oracle's cloud-based financial accounting system to manage corporate finances effectively in online shopping and in over 2,000 branches, including Lotus Malaysia.

In terms of sustainability, Oracle believes that it is at the heart of business operations, from managing natural resource uses to ensuring responsible supply chain practices and running global sustainable events.

Oracle cloud allows its customers to not only increase business value but also reduce their environmental impact, given the fact that cloud computing and AI are now related to sustainability requirements, he said.

The advantages of environmental, social, governance (ESG) programs can be extended throughout the organisation.

First, the company can save money by reducing waste.

Second, they can protect customers' human rights and mental health.

Finally, when organisations have a diverse leadership supported by a strong governance framework, employee morale improves and it is easier to retain top talent, Taveesak added.

"Business partners must adhere to ESG standards. It is no longer something ‘nice to have’ or ‘optional to have’ going forward. The benchmark set by ESG is rising to a new level. AI and cloud computing will be vital in the evolution," he predicted.