ET OnlineOracle launched the SOAR program to fast-track customer migration to the cloud. Not only has this program helped complete the migration process in time but also optimize costs. In a conversation with ET, Inderjit Bains — Senior Director, ERP Cloud Product Marketing & Innovation — talks about what SOAR entails and how it is benefiting customers by saving both cost and time. Edited excerpts:
Could you please elaborate on the SOAR program?
The SOAR program addresses the needs of our existing on-premise customers. It helps them accelerate their upgradation to the cloud. It takes a lot of the aspects of moving data and a lot of the basic components, and fast-tracks their set-up in the cloud, reducing the amount of time.
If you are already on Oracle, it will accelerate your journey to the cloud. So if you are an existing on-premise customer – Oracle is going to provide you with the value of SOAR. Which means you can get to cloud sooner and faster with Oracle than anything else and can do it with less risk, less time, less cost.
The program ensures that this is the last upgrade you will ever do because all your future upgrades will be managed by Oracle.
How has been the response of your clients to SOAR?
We have seen a lot of success with customers globally across different regions. A very strong percentage of our on-premise customers today are exploring SOAR because they see it as the least risky, lowest-cost way to move to cloud. Since it was Oracle they were working on and it is Oracle that they are introducing, it puts us in a very unique position to help them accelerate the journey — with the lowest risk, at the lowest cost and at a pace that puts them at ease.
The SOAR automation tools and methodologies significantly accelerate time-to-value and remove the risks associated with human intervention. As a customer using SOAR, you could reduce the time and cost of cloud migration by up to 30 per cent. Our tools enable customers with applications running on-premise to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Applications in as little as 20 weeks. In the process, they are able to eliminate costly legacy customizations and streamline and adopt modern best practices that are built into Oracle Cloud.
What challenges do you face when you take a new customer on board?
The main challenge is that when a company adopts a new technology, they try to copy-paste old business processes that were designed for a world where the expectations of the customer or the employees were very different.
What I mean is, when you move to cloud, you should take the opportunity to start with a clean sheet. If you just copy-paste your old processes to the new technology platform, all you are doing is you are doing business the old way on a new platform. So, you end up missing out on the opportunity.
Most customers today understand that there is a lot of value in moving to cloud and adopting the new practices. So, the challenges include helping the customer see how to do business in a new way and leveraging technology to enable the transformation.
After this comes the aspect of skill set and change of management. It’s important to initiate technology conversations among people in an organisation. People have to be aligned with the end goal. IT has to understand what the business is trying to accomplish. So, the challenges aren’t as much on the technology side as they are on the internal culture and the alignment of people-process-technology.
We help them understand how to navigate through this transformation by not just adopting technology but by aligning their people with all the process to gain the full value of the transformation.
What will Oracle focus more on in 2020?
We are updating on every quarterly release — we are bringing value — to help our clients achieve targets faster and in a smarter way. Whether it is initiatives like helping them improve the time of cash payment or intelligent invoice scanning, we will be automating more and more as we go forward.
Organisations could use invoice technology which we used to automate invoice scanning. In earlier technologies, when you had to enter other details manually, the accuracy rate was about 60%. But with ML, we are moving into the 90% accuracy range and more.
Now, if you receive an invoice and ERP cloud has not received that kind of format before, then it actually learns how you interpret the invoice — things like when you insert the spaces — so that going forward, our cloud is able to do more of that.
So, we are automating more and more of the repeatable tasks so that clients can get the best out of their business and move it forward with the help of the best of strategies and more involvement with stakeholders.
Could you please elaborate on the SOAR program?
The SOAR program addresses the needs of our existing on-premise customers. It helps them accelerate their upgradation to the cloud. It takes a lot of the aspects of moving data and a lot of the basic components, and fast-tracks their set-up in the cloud, reducing the amount of time.
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If you are already on Oracle, it will accelerate your journey to the cloud. So if you are an existing on-premise customer – Oracle is going to provide you with the value of SOAR. Which means you can get to cloud sooner and faster with Oracle than anything else and can do it with less risk, less time, less cost.
The program ensures that this is the last upgrade you will ever do because all your future upgrades will be managed by Oracle.
How has been the response of your clients to SOAR?
We have seen a lot of success with customers globally across different regions. A very strong percentage of our on-premise customers today are exploring SOAR because they see it as the least risky, lowest-cost way to move to cloud. Since it was Oracle they were working on and it is Oracle that they are introducing, it puts us in a very unique position to help them accelerate the journey — with the lowest risk, at the lowest cost and at a pace that puts them at ease.
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The SOAR automation tools and methodologies significantly accelerate time-to-value and remove the risks associated with human intervention. As a customer using SOAR, you could reduce the time and cost of cloud migration by up to 30 per cent. Our tools enable customers with applications running on-premise to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Applications in as little as 20 weeks. In the process, they are able to eliminate costly legacy customizations and streamline and adopt modern best practices that are built into Oracle Cloud.
What challenges do you face when you take a new customer on board?
The main challenge is that when a company adopts a new technology, they try to copy-paste old business processes that were designed for a world where the expectations of the customer or the employees were very different.
What I mean is, when you move to cloud, you should take the opportunity to start with a clean sheet. If you just copy-paste your old processes to the new technology platform, all you are doing is you are doing business the old way on a new platform. So, you end up missing out on the opportunity.
Most customers today understand that there is a lot of value in moving to cloud and adopting the new practices. So, the challenges include helping the customer see how to do business in a new way and leveraging technology to enable the transformation.
After this comes the aspect of skill set and change of management. It’s important to initiate technology conversations among people in an organisation. People have to be aligned with the end goal. IT has to understand what the business is trying to accomplish. So, the challenges aren’t as much on the technology side as they are on the internal culture and the alignment of people-process-technology.
We help them understand how to navigate through this transformation by not just adopting technology but by aligning their people with all the process to gain the full value of the transformation.
What will Oracle focus more on in 2020?
We are updating on every quarterly release — we are bringing value — to help our clients achieve targets faster and in a smarter way. Whether it is initiatives like helping them improve the time of cash payment or intelligent invoice scanning, we will be automating more and more as we go forward.
Organisations could use invoice technology which we used to automate invoice scanning. In earlier technologies, when you had to enter other details manually, the accuracy rate was about 60%. But with ML, we are moving into the 90% accuracy range and more.
Now, if you receive an invoice and ERP cloud has not received that kind of format before, then it actually learns how you interpret the invoice — things like when you insert the spaces — so that going forward, our cloud is able to do more of that.
So, we are automating more and more of the repeatable tasks so that clients can get the best out of their business and move it forward with the help of the best of strategies and more involvement with stakeholders.
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