June 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8To Oracle and Beyond...HIREN DESAI, DIRECTOR TECHNOLOGY, KAISER PERMANENTEhe technology and business landscape of today are changing more rapidly than ever before. Terms such as Chief Customer Officer, Chief Client Officer, Chief Experience Officer were unheard of in yesteryears and were simply known as another title. All this has changed in the recent years, with the advent of many new business and technology factors like Cloud computing where one never hears the old discussion on whether to move to the cloud or not, the role of UX which has become vital not just to product teams but to the entire organization. Many companies like Slack, Uber, Apple, Amazon are prioritizing the customer experience over all else and making it an important part of their company's culture and deliverables. There are many other similar examples as well. Suffice to say, this changing landscape has made technology software and hardware suppliers to adapt, innovate and improve on their traditional ways of working and Oracle is no exception to that.The role of the CIO in addition to delivering integrations whether on-premise or in the cloud has evolved to one that not only oversees the overall technology strategy but one that also works with the Chief Experience Officer to increase customer reach via new channels, provide business intelligence that is predictive and prescriptive and doing all of this in the most secure manner possible while maintaining agility and scalability. All these items are not just for technology discussions but are also being discussed at the board levels.Applications are rapidly moving to the cloud for many reasons such as taking advantages of the emerging technologies available in the cloud, scaling elastically to match demands, reduce time, effort and complexity of managing a large on-premise infrastructure, pay for IT resources that are used, focus more on innovation amongst a host of other benefits while avoiding cloud lock-ins. In addition to cloud computing, other technologies are also converging and gaining greater adoption like Machine Learning, AI, Blockchain for high-trust transactions, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and user engagement using Voice Technologies. The convergence of all these technologies is happening at the data level and has led to a new saying "Data is the new oil" wherein data is managed autonomously leading to it always being available, trusted, and secure. This is only possible with much greater degrees of automation in maintenance activities like patching and updates while the system is up and running. Oracle has taken the lead in extreme automation with the Oracle Autonomous Database which is the industry's first hands-off database that is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing. Combined with this a single identity is also provided by Oracle that bridges premises and the cloud irrespective of whether the cloud is hybrid or a public cloud.While Cloud computing's rapid growth is unstoppable, organizations have also realized that a single ERP, SCM, HCM or CRM that meets all the enterprise's needs in a large, complex, and THiren DesaiIN MY View
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