Multinational software company Oracle prepares to bring micro, small and medium enterprises into the cloud or the internet.
Oracle Philippines managing director Mina Lim said it would greatly improve the performance of MSMEs if they got connected to the cloud, as this would optimize operations and keep capital expenditures at bay.
“We see this as an opportunity for many businesses to go into cloud, whether they are small or big businesses. For smaller companies, they can go straight to the cloud without worrying about capital expenditure. The technology is in the same platform as those available for big businesses,” she said.
Oracle wants to tap the huge potential of MSMEs’ migration into cloud as 99 percent of businesses in the Philippines are considered small MSMEs.
The battle for expenses lies between operating expenditures and capital expenditures of any company, including a micro enterprise, she said.
“It is better for companies, big or small, to concentrate on their core competencies. For MSMEs it could be on manufacturing or services as well as for big companies. Leave the operational maintenance to us,” she said.
“Cost will always be a part of the conversation, but the way to growing the business is to focus on it, and allow technology and cloud providers like us to maintain and secure the system for them,” she said.
Oracle serves clients in the Philippines in the sectors of banking, telecommunications, BPO, MSME and real estate.
Lim said Union Bank of the Philippines, one of its clients, has fearlessly embraced technology and cloud applications ahead of the its competitors.
“The journey of Union Bank into digital banking has defied concerns of the banking sector that dared not to trudge the path that was unfamiliar then,” Lim said.
Union Bank has commissioned Oracle to migrate its human capital management system into cloud on top of the data on clients, a first in the industry.
The system will match the job for talents employed within Union Bank’s HCM and allow them to grow with the company’s transition to digitalization, which is among the four modules by Oracle.
“Look at Union Bank. They got rid of all the things they think are a constraint to them. They went to Central Bank to get approval. They believe this is how they will manage their talents –keep them, train them. A very powerful message,” Lim said, adding that the Central Bank is being progressive in giving the go signal to simplify the bank’s procedure.
Oracle now has the technology to infuse cloud applications with artificial intelligence-based apps for finance, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, commerce, customer service, marketing and sales professionals.
To empower commerce, marketing, sales and service professionals to deliver smarter experiences across the customer lifecycle, Oracle has expanded its portfolio of artificial intelligence-based customer experience apps.
New AI-powered capabilities improve search capabilities within the Oracle CX Cloud Suite commerce platform, optimize marketing campaign execution, shorten sales cycles and streamline customer service processes.
For example, in the quoting process, AI-driven graphical price optimization provides sales professionals with guidance to provide select discretionary discounts as appropriate.
By applying advanced data science and machine learning to Oracle’s web-scale data and an organization’s own data, the new Adaptive Intelligent Apps can react, learn, and adapt in real time based on historical and dynamic customer data.
Lim said the bottomline of all of the Oracle cloud functionalities is productivity.
“Why is the measure of productivity important to companies? Because they want to keep clients, to provide the right service at the right time notwithstanding if the company is big or small. They will invest their money to keep clients happy. It’s all about customer experience, retaining and winning customers, and the benefit will always translate to dollars,” she said.
Oracle said that in the Philippines, cloud is very important. “The volume of growing businesses especially the MSMEs is a feeder for many cloud service providers like us. When you are in cloud you are always on top of technology because Oracle will upgrade for you,” said Lim.
“We are very bullish. We have the technology and I think the market is accepting it already. We have customers adapting to cloud and they are in various stages. Our presence in telco, banking, government is very strong. You’ll be surprised there are early adaptors especially the medium-sized and they easily adapt to the program,” she said.
