If a company stops moving, it fails. It is a form of corporate natural selection. With the advent of the cloud, however, the pace of change has increased, with businesses facing new competitive threats and change driven by customers.

It’s no secret we live in the age of ‘empowered customers’; people today are better-informed, and have very specific demands when it comes to what they expect businesses to deliver. If a company fails to do so, then customers simply go elsewhere (often after posting on social media sites).

Businesses are ill-prepared for the pace of change
These threats are coming thick and fast and businesses must find ways of responding to them if they are to maintain growth. Alarmingly, however, in Oracle’s view, many businesses are not as prepared for the ever-accelerating rate of change as they might think.

While 64 percent of employees at global businesses consider their organisation to be agile, most cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test and launch new applications, leaving such businesses poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats. Indeed, many do not have an IT infrastructure capable of meeting competitive threats, such as the ability of competitors to launch innovative customer services more rapidly (which businesses cite as their main competitive threat).

The good news for businesses is that the cloud is already delivering technologies that are capable of meeting all these challenges. One of the most important innovations in this respect has been the emergence of cloud platforms, commonly referred to as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which can help businesses to more rapidly develop and launch new services, business models and applications, giving them that much-needed competitive edge.

Building a business in the cloud
Cloud platforms work in a similar way to the now familiar Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and in many respects augments this important cloud service.

Whereas SaaS offerings use the cloud to deliver complete business applications to organisations as a service (for example, sales team management applications or accounting software for the finance team), cloud platforms delivers the tools, capabilities and resources businesses need to create their own applications and to tailor existing and third party applications to more exactly meet their unique operational requirements over the cloud.

However, businesses today can already do all this with on-premises systems, so why should they move their development platforms to the cloud? It all comes down to that key question of agility and the need to keep pace with a fast-changing business environment.

Cloud platforms mean speed
Traditionally, developing, testing and launching new applications takes weeks at best, but more often than not months (the majority of businesses fall within a six month timeframe for application development for mobile apps, for example). Just the task of maintaining the database and middleware that support all the application development and deployment environments can become so time-consuming that IT has little opportunity to update or extend existing applications. As a result, innovation slows while the cost of supporting that innovation continues to rise.

This is why cloud platforms are such a powerful proposition. The best cloud platforms on offer allow businesses to integrate seamlessly with their SaaS and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions. This in effect allows for virtualisation of application development while still having access to the same standards, tools, and skill sets as they are used to from their on-premises environment. Modern cloud platform offerings also enable businesses to shift workloads between public and private cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments, allowing easy migration of on-premise applications to the cloud (and back).

Not all platforms are created equally
It is important to note, however, that not all cloud platforms are created equally. Before investing in a solution, businesses must take the time to ensure the chosen option includes all the right agile features and is capable of delivering cloud services for database, big data, integration, mobile and process.

The right cloud platform is, therefore, an enabler of the modern enterprise, providing the means of rolling out services more quickly to satisfy the demands of empowered customers and the need to innovate within the business. Cloud platforms enable a state of permanent development and accelerated transformation within the business. They allow organisations to build on their big data insights and unleash creativity at will.

In short, PaaS is an evolutionary mechanism through which businesses can rapidly adapt and learn not only to survive in an ever-changing market, but to thrive. The result? Innovation, business agility and a better customer experience.

ABOUT TIM SCOTT//

Tim Scott is sales director of Oracle Cloud Platform and is based in Sydney, Australia.