Many organisations in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) region are not as agile as they should be and are poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats, according to a study by Oracle.

The results of the “Oracle Cloud Agility” study revealed that many businesses cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test, and launch new applications.

The study also found a lack of awareness among businesses around how technology, like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), can be used to help address these challenges.

About 62 per cent of the study’s 1,004 respondents considered their organisation to be agile (i.e., able to adjust quickly to new business opportunities or to iterate new products and services quickly), while 78 per cent stated that the ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch new business applications is either important or critically important to the success of their business.

In particular, nearly 30 per cent of respondents believed that the effective mobilisation of applications and services is the most important factor for business success today when it comes to IT infrastructure, the study said.

The ability of competitors to launch innovative customer services more rapidly was identified as the top threat by businesses (27 per cent). However, up to 58 per cent of businesses do not have an IT infrastructure capable of responding to these competitive threats, it added.

Significantly, the survey reveals the agility benefits delivered by PaaS are not being leveraged. In fact, 59 per cent of EMEA businesses either cannot, or do not know if they can shift workloads between public, private, and hybrid clouds, and migrate on-premises applications to the cloud.

Additionally, only 44 per cent of businesses can develop, test and deploy new business applications for use on mobile devices within six months, with this figure falling to just 27 per cent within a one month timeframe.

Only 34 per cent of respondents stated that they fully understood what PaaS is, while 20 per cent admitted that they do not understand it at all. For those that say they do understand PaaS, only 28 per cent cited reduced timeframes for application development as a main benefit.

Tino Scholman, vice president of Oracle Cloud, EMEA, commented that awareness gap emerging around how businesses can become more agile; most businesses don’t realise the power of PaaS solutions to help them launch new services quickly.

“If you want to become more innovative and experiment more often, then you have to make sure your Cost of Innovation goes down and goes down quickly. We want to help bridge this awareness gap by showing businesses how the right cloud platform solution can enable them to react almost immediately to market conditions and get well ahead of the competition,” he added. - TradeArabia News Service