Steve Cox - Group Vice President, Oracle ERP And EPM Product Marketing, in an exclusive conversation with Sarabjeet Kaur, BW CIOWORLD explains how Oracle is using emerging technologies like IoT, blockchain, AI, and ML to enable software to do the jobs that humans have done before that don’t add value to organizations anymore. Excerpts:

• How does Oracle make use of emerging technologies to increase their customer’s business efficiency? 

The Future is here for us and as well as for our customers. Emerging technologies like AI, ML, blockchain, big data, IoT, data, analytics, and cloud are not to be used in the future but can be implemented right now in any organization. Our fundamental argument is that all of these things are available from Oracle and we help you make the transformation you need to make sure your organization is ready for the future— to have sustainable competitive advantage, enjoy step changes in productivity, drive economies of innovation in the organization, and for preparing the organization to always leverage the best and new technologies for its own competitive advantage.

To do what you’re required to do is all about these emerging technologies. Every organization’s journey is a bit different but their destination tends to be the same. The commonalities are greater intelligence for business for better decision making, agility in responding to the pace of change faster, and greater influence to not only make decisions faster but to actually impact the organization across a broader set of functions.

• Oracle is gaining a lot of momentum in its cloud business. How are you increasing business agility, lowering costs, and reducing IT complexity with Oracle Soar?

Oracle Soar is a new approach of helping our customers in their transition to the cloud. Oracle has simplified the transition by using an approach that eliminates complexities, ordinates the process, and at the same time allows the customer to monitor the process throughout the implementation or adoption period. This is the last upgrade which is fast, simple, and calls for minimum business disruption.

After the upgrade, customers adopt Oracle ERP which has a 90 days innovation cycle. Since the pace of change in business is accelerating, Oracle delivers new features and new capabilities every 90 days. The upgrade process is very easy to adapt so it is not business disruptive and equips the back office functions as well. Post-adoption, we are making it easy to sustain the scope of adoption and eliminating mundane tasks from IT function and replacing them with value-added tasks. The big and emerging technologies like IoT, blockchain, AI, and ML are enabling software to do the jobs that humans have done before and don’t add value to the organization.

• What kind of traction is Oracle ERP cloud gaining from local and multinational firms operating out of India?

The number of conversations that we are having with customers who want to adopt the cloud is almost infinite. We are seeing customer after customer embarking on the journey with us. This is a journey that is easy to make and has very clear goals so it really is very important because of the business change as it is the driver behind all of this. Via Oracle, this becomes very simple as we are the only organization that can deliver innovation at scale. There is no vendor who has a more complete cloud offering than Oracle.

• Organizations need to be one step ahead of the curve in terms of technology and innovation. How does Oracle help their customers to do that?

We highlight opportunities to improve business processes. It is really about co-innovation with our customers and spotting opportunities to improve processes—not just by a small percentage but by step change improvements. That’s staying ahead of the curve by not just responding to a problem but anticipating it as well.