New Year, New Game for Business Data Management
By Nilantha Brito, Oracle's Senior Sales Director, Autonomous Database, ASEAN
The idea of autonomous technologies has spiked over the past few years with a wide range of different industries incorporating the term in different products, such as vehicles. However, what does ‘Autonomous’ really mean? What kind of impact will it have, and what kind of benefits can we glean from it?
As is tradition in the new year, we often reflect internally, assessing how much we’ve grown over the past 12 months. From there, we form our resolutions – goals we set for ourselves in the days ahead.
Driving New Goals with Automation
Similarly, ASEAN organisations and businesses looking to succeed in the digital economy are recommended to do the same – review their current performance by looking at areas for growth and improvement. This provides a foundation from which to craft actionable plans that will help us achieve our fresh ambitions. This plan of action is becoming even more crucial now that organisations are facing a new set of challenges.
In this new age, consumers require on-demand services and solutions tailored to their specific needs. In order to create that gold-class customer experience to meet these demands, organisations need constant accessibility to all of their data throughout the business, to enable employees to make faster and better data-driven decisions.
A rocky road ahead
However, there are a number of challenges companies face when seeking to move into this new data-driven world.
Today’s organisations are faced with an unprecedented volume of data being generated every day and coming in forms and from external sources that organisations are just not used to harnessing. In addition, enterprise data, which you might have thought would be the easiest to leverage, is often stored in multiple, separate locations, with only a small proportion being used. Leveraging both this new and existing data is complex, and requires solutions that far outpace human capabilities.
Additionally, the implementation of innovative new applications and business solutions that are needed to make experiences, information, goods and services more accessible by bringing data to life, are starting to hit a roadblock. Indeed, the 2019 Oracle Innovation Report found that in Asia Pacific, fewer than 20 percent of innovation-focused projects are coming to life despite there being a clear link between growth and innovation. A key reason for this was businesses lack the right technology to enable them to execute and deliver their innovation projects.
Data security is another major pain point enterprises face. As businesses practice data agility, there is a risk of them neglecting data security and this will likely impact the quality of insights derived from data made available.
Creating new possibilities in the new decade
Fortunately, new emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are helping reduce the degree of human intervention needed to achieve the necessary agility and security.
They have also given rise to a revolutionary new approach to data management through the advent of Oracle Autonomous Database. With AI and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities at its core, this new portfolio comprising Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Database, automates tedious and mundane tasks that would have previously consumed a large amount of work-hours from memory management to workload monitoring and tuning enabling them to be self-driving and self-repairing. These autonomous capabilities also apply to the security of the database as well as enabling it to self-secure by autonomously being able to detect, respond to and prevent internal and external threats.
As a result, the Autonomous Database frees up IT teams to focus on tasks that will bring value to the business, but its impact doesn’t stop there. In fact, the effects of implementing the Autonomous Database reaches further across other parts of an organisation than just IT to include finance, operations, and marketing.
Again, using AI and ML, these offerings can also bring data-driven insights to the fingertips of the employees who need it quickly and simply, revolutionising how they access and use data.
Creating real impact
PTG Energy, a leading full-service provider with the second largest retail gas business in Thailand, is an example of an organisation who has benefited from Oracle Autonomous Database. As a large enterprise with operations that cover renewable energy, retail, F&B, convenience stores and more, PTG needed to make sure its workforce was up to speed to be able to perform efficiently and make better business decisions through a single source of truth. However, the business was relying on a previous database that did not have the capabilities to meet their growing business, resulting in slow reporting and decision making.
Tapping into Oracle Autonomous Database, PTG was able to efficiently identify new and emerging customer behaviours for the company to target, a new-found opportunity that enables PTG to enhance their overall customer service experience.
Another example is financial service provider Forth Smart, which operates over 120,000 vending machines in Thailand that allow customers to top up their mobile phones and transfer money, generating approximately two million transactions per day. With the Autonomous Database, Forth Smart was able to gain real-time insight into its network of vending machines – a task which previously took up to three days to consolidate the same information. This has had a significant impact across the company’s financial reporting abilities and enabled it to undertake complex segmentation and predictive analytics, allowing for a greater focus on innovation.
Ushering in an era of autonomous
Every organisation needs a great enabler to maximise, and realise the value of all its data to thrive in an economy where disruption is common and innovation mandatory for success. The benefits these two examples illustrate why I believe that having an Autonomous Database is vital to the foundation of every modern business.
With its self-driving, self-repairing and self-securing capabilities, the Autonomous Database enables businesses to operate in a much more agile fashion. It allows the reallocation of IT resources to value added activities, and gives employees data at their fingertips with the absolute minimal level of intervention required.
In combination, these two results mean that companies can step more deeply into the realm of innovation, edging out competitors as they have the ability and insight to offer unique value propositions to their customers and better fulfil their needs. This holds true be it in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Fintech, or other industries across the ASEAN region.
So as they say, “out with the old and in with the new,” so this new year, let us welcome the Autonomous Database.
