I was invited to an Oracle seminar last week, with the title “Banking on Cloud” and sub-title “The coming of age for Financial Services”.
The main speaker was Bryan Glick, Editor in Chief of Computer Weekly.
Computer weekly was a ubiquitous magazine found on every desk, when I started my IT career at Chase Manhattan in 1988. With the Internet and Segmentation of special interests magazines and website, I cannot recall the last time I saw a copy.
Bryan delivered an inspiring talk on Cloud, with following key points
- Financial Sector is lagging other sectors (e.g. Retail, Media) in the adoption of Cloud.
- 3% of Financial Enterprise IT is on Cloud.
- Retail firms (Tesco, John Lewis) are pushing heavily into cloud.
- Some have even mandated that they will no longer procure installed software.
- Procurement costs being lower are a significant driver, however not the major one.
- Business Strategy is the key driver, so Retail firms are being disrupted by online firms and cannot respond fast enough by relying on Enterprise IT, so have no choice but to deploy Cloud offerings or risk being out-competed.
- Disruptive change happens when a technology is commoditised and not when it is invented.
- This disruption means that new players emerge and the market fragments, with profits moving to new firms.
- Finance regulation is holding back adoption of public cloud.
- However this will catch up as Cloud Providers respond to the specific needs of the sector e.g. location of data, data security, audit access, portability.
- Financial firms will have to adopt public cloud or be out-competed by nimbler firms that do,
Great talk, very inspiring and I found myself storing away ammunition for future meetings with those firms that insist that software must be installed in-house. A comeback with lower cost or direct service is not always a compelling comeback. Just need to figure out how to deliver a disruptive change message as well as Bryan.
This left Oracle’s Daniel Healy with a hard act to follow, which he did admirably given that he had to present a short overview of Oracle product offerings. By this time my mind was still mulling over the prior talk; so only a few points stuck: Enterprise manager can manage resources that are local or cloud, Engineered Services provide Exdata managed boxes for high performance, many Oracle products have cloud pricing options.
Then a few drinks and home with the very nice moleskine notebooks in the marketing pack.
Thank you to our friends at oracle.