South African business is fast adopting and applying cloud solutions as a means of transforming business.
Speaking at the Oracle Apps day event at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) today, Sudarshan Roongta, Oracle’s vice president for EMEA industry and insight, said South Africa is fast accepting cloud technology in the running of organisations, with significant amounts being spent on IT and cloud.
“South Africa already started an early adoption of cloud. A third of organisations in South Africa are piloting or have adopted cloud,” said Roongta.
He said, in South Africa, the fields of industry showing considerable adoption of cloud includes IT, marketing and sales, logistics, finance and human resources.
Roongta said within South Africa and on a global scale, IT and cloud are no longer simply “a buzz or a trend” in the world of business as “the whole SaaS (Software as a Service) market is exploding.”
“What we are seeing increasingly over the last year is a lot of these discussions are about how do we leverage cloud, how do we leverage SaaS to transform the business.”
According to Roongta, cloud can be leveraged to transform business by growing customer base and empowering sales, and will improve both operational effectiveness and customer service, thus improving the customer experience.
Roongta believes cloud technology has the answer to everything.
Rajan Krishnan, vice president of applications product development and product management for the Oracle Corporation’s EMEA region, spoke at the event about social media and the important role it plays in business.
“Social marketing allows you to develop campaigns via the social media – via Facebook, via Google+, via Twitter and so on, in a manner that is consistent with other channels,” said Krishnan.
Krishnan then used Facebook pages as an example to further stress the importance of social media as a marketing tool.
“A B2B (Business to Business) company has close to 10 million “likes”, which is a pretty big number” for a company that doesn’t deal with customers directly.
He made reference to Coca-Cola, which currently has more than 61 million “likes” and Pepsi has approximately 9.5 million.
“Social marketing, on the one hand” as a way “to communicate with your customers is increasingly becoming the most preferred channel, and gaining insights from the conversations that are happening in the social media, its where social engagement and monitoring become important,” said Krishnan.
Furthermore Krishnan says social engagement is important because a conversation “posted on any media site” provides much insight with regards to “when, where, gender, what they are talking about, positive feelings, [and] negative feelings”.
