Nearly half (48 per cent) of businesses in the UAE experienced staff downtime over the past six months due to cloud application integration problems, a report said.

A further 56 per cent said project deadlines had been missed in the six months prior to the survey due to similar problems around integration, added the “Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” report released by Oracle, which highlights that the majority of businesses around the world have not yet adequately integrated their cloud applications across their business functions.

Oracle partnered with market research firm Dynamic Markets to survey 1,355 executives from companies across the world with revenues of $65 million or more.

Globally, the vast majority (83 per cent) of businesses have been prevented from getting the best out of their departmental cloud applications, with one in four blaming poor integration with other applications, the report said.

Importantly, 75 per cent said their ability to innovate using cloud applications has also been hindered, with one in two (53 per cent) citing a lack of integration.

Over three quarters (76 per cent) of businesses stated that their motivation behind deploying cloud applications was to get quick access to software.

The good news is that the majority of businesses have recognized the need to better integrate business functions and applications, according to Oracle findings.

The vast majority (81 per cent) of companies stated that it is important that cloud applications are fully integrated with each other and with other software in the organization.

Among those whose departments use cloud applications, 73 per cent say having cloud data handled externally by one or more cloud vendors makes it hard for their department to be compliant. This applies to all departments, and to 77 per cent of those in finance and to 71 per cent of those in HR.

Indeed, roughly 1 in 10 of those in finance, HR and risk / compliance thinks it’s extremely hard to be compliant under these circumstances, said the report.

“Cloud applications have the power to dramatically improve business performance while reducing costs, but only if they can work across the business,” said Rex Wang, vice president of product marketing, Oracle.

“For example, sales managers need to have their territory planning and quota management tools integrated with the Human Resource and Compensation applications in order to better drive behavior and achieve sales goals. Subscribing to a cloud service may be relatively straightforward, but how this application fits in with the rest of the enterprise, including on-premise systems and other cloud applications must be thought through.

“Oracle’s Cloud portfolio has been built with this in mind, enabling us to provide integrated cloud solutions for the whole enterprise. This is a unique capability which means that our customers can source all of their cloud requirements from one place and deliver integrated processes across all their lines of business,” he added.

Cloud Computing Solution leader ECEMA, Ahmed Adly said “Organisations are looking to the cloud to change how they buy and consume IT, and to improve operational agility.”

“It is not surprising then that, operational silos are often preventing organizations from realizing the promise of improved business performance.

“In addition, there is a lack of awareness that by using multiple cloud providers, or not understanding that some cloud providers employ a third party to manage the data, companies will face even greater challenges when they want their applications to integrate with each other,” he added. – TradeArabia News Service