In business, agility is a company’s ability to always be ready or in a position to take account of market changes. In other words, an agile business is able to easily adapt to changes, specifically in the market, in ways that are not only cost effective but also productive.

Agility. This is what most businesses lack nowadays. While many organizations believe that they are agile enough, a study by Oracle revealed otherwise. The Oracle Cloud Agility study came out with results that indicated a large number of businesses are not as flexible as they would like to believe they are, especially in terms of workload management, and in developing, testing, and launching new applications. In addition, the changes needed in the enterprise are also not given proper attention. Likewise, many companies have inflexible IT systems.

For businesses, an inflexible IT means decreased capabilities that are needed to face competitive challenges, particularly those that involve customer demands and services. This is what a low agility level looks like.

A big contributor to organizations’ low agility is their lack of information regarding technology. For example, many of the businesses that participated in the study did not know that Platform as a Service (PaaS) can be used in addressing problems like workload management, speedy development and launching of new applications. In fact, there are quite a number of companies without any idea what PaaS is all about. The PaaS cloud computing model works over the Internet in delivering applications without requiring in-house hardware and software installation.

If an enterprise does not have available data that managers can use, what usually happens is that day-to-day operations are run and managed through a knowledge-and-guesswork pattern. If this is the case, then it is understandable why the company lacks agility. And this is an important factor to a business’ success. With the help of PaaS, building new applications will be easier. This means that businesses are then able to become more competitive.

The Key to Effective Management

However, it was also revealed in the survey that PaaS agility benefits are not properly controlled. This means (again) that most enterprises do not really have an idea how they can make use of the technology given to them. Oracle used the term “awareness gap” in describing a situation wherein businesses do not know how to use technology in addressing tech-based issues. Many are still not aware that PaaS can help their business get ahead of the competition by ensuring rapid building and launching of applications. There are some that are already quite familiar with PaaS, but this group is still not familiar with what PaaS has to offer, specifically the Oracle Cloud Platform.

As per the results of the survey, it is clear that companies need to be informed of how the Oracle Platform can help improve business agility. All that they have to do is allow the integration of Oracle Cloud Platform into their IT system. And this is something very doable.

Once the Oracle Cloud Platform is woven into the company’s IT infrastructure, it will be easy to cut application development timeframes. Likewise, addressing customer demands will also be simpler.

The Oracle In-Memory Option

Memory-Optimized Database

A memory-optimized database organizes its data in-memory, not on-disk. In other words, the data, when in memory, is placed in a space and arranged in such a way that rapid data access is possible. Data is kept in memory at all times; there are no disk buffers, which involves quite a tedious process when you need to fetch data.

Although data is well organized, a memory-optimized database cannot guarantee fast turnaround for same data transaction and query processing. This is where Oracle comes in.

In-Memory Option

One of the many advantages of the Oracle Cloud Platform is its In-Memory Option, which is intended to allow users to query live transaction data and deliver high performance transactional database. There are several advantages delivered by the In-Memory Option:

• Making timely intra-day decisions is achievable because it can do high-speed query on live transactional data. In short, making decisions based on the current state of play is very possible.
• Since In-Memory Option does not require secondary indexes, storage costs are lowered. This also means lesser time and effort spent on administration and operation.
• No need for changes in data conversion or any changes in configuration in order to use this Oracle Database feature.
• Businesses become more agile and responsive to market demands & opportunities as a result of data driven (not scripted) business processes.

Oracle’s In-Memory Option optimizes both the analytical queries and transactions, which means fishing for immediate response is now possible.

To paint a clearer picture of what Oracle Database’s In-Memory Option is capable of doing, take AT&T Wireless as an example. The company, one of the world’s largest, implemented the In-Memory Option and got more than the result that it hoped for. Although the expectation was to improve query time, the AT&T Wireless group did not expect it to drop to 10 seconds. In addition, load time has also improved and is now around 10 to 15% faster.

Business Agility Drives a Company’s Growth

Achieving agility is important for businesses because it is what drives a company to improve productivity, applications development, customer service and overall efficiency. At the same time, it encourages innovation without having to dig deep into the financial pockets of the company. It is cost effective and drives results.

The Oracle Cloud Platform offers an integrated portfolio of platform services that can be easily integrated into a company’s existing IT infrastructure. Its comprehensiveness is such that enterprises will be able to improve the development and deployment of modern business applications and make the turnaround time faster, thereby improving the agility of the company. It’s the all-in-one cloud platform for every IT need.

Oracle’s In-Memory Option is a valuable investment because it can change the way companies and IT systems use data. It can make organizations improve its agility and overall performance.

Photo courtesy of Oracle.