Oracle Cloud Platform Allows Organisations to Accelerate Business Transformation.
Oracle has announced its Impact Technology Summit, hosted in Nairobi and geared towards driving awareness of emerging technologies and their impact on business.
“Emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain are changing the way companies do business at every level, across every function, in ways we are only starting to imagine,” says Corine Mbiaketcha Nana, Managing Director Kenya Hub covering East, Central and West Africa at Oracle.
Impact Kenya brings together domain experts and business leaders to discuss the influence emerging technologies has on business innovation. The summit explores how the right technologies, when used in combination, can make innovation something businesses do every single day.
“The cloud is the engine that enables businesses to innovate faster, improve customer engagement, drive business-process efficiency, and accelerate digital transformation. It is the enabler of emerging technologies such as AI, Machine Learning and Blockchain,” says Mbiaketcha Nana.
An example of the impact of cloud-enablement is the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). To support its strategic drive to enhance service delivery to taxpayers, KRA deployed Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that provides it with a single platform to better understand customer needs and respond to their demands more quickly and efficiently.
A recent example of blockchain’s impact is Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) that piloted Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service to provide it with a trusted platform for the full automation of Customs Excise Trade business processes and procedures. This technology allows NCS to document and track products that are manufactured locally, right from the source of licensing and permits for manufacturing, to distribution and point of sale. This proof of concept shows that the entire business environment of NCS can be migrated to blockchain to automate as many customs processes as possible, creating transparency and predictability.
Oracle has in recent months announced new products that put the power of several emerging technologies into the hands of its customers:
Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps provide a suite of pre-built AI and data-driven capabilities for the entire enterprise across customer experience (CX), human capital management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing.
In March Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, which provides an easy-to-use, fully autonomous database that scales elastically, delivers fast query performance and requires no database administration.
In July Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service that provides customers with a development platform to build their own networks, and to quickly integrate with Oracle SaaS and third-party applications they already use, as well as other blockchain networks and Oracle PaaS services. It also enables users to provision blockchain networks, join other organisations, and deploy and run smart contracts to update and query the ledger.
In August Oracle announced the availability of the latest Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Service, Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing. Leveraging innovative machine learning and automation capabilities, Oracle’s new self-driving database cloud service is built to run the most demanding finance, retail, manufacturing, and government applications, supporting a complex mix of high-performance transaction processing, reporting, batch, and analytic workloads.
Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service is the platform behind Oracle Cloud-based IoT asset monitoring, production monitoring, connected workers, and fleet monitoring applications.
Chatbots built using Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise can infer earlier parts of a buyer-seller conversation, so that consumers don’t have to reiterate or contextualise their queries. Integrated APIs, such as a recommendation API, give chatbots access to customer purchase histories and preferences, improving a company’s chances of selling additional goods or services.
“It’s time to stop thinking about emerging technologies as scary or disruptive challenges business needs to overcome. Business leaders must move beyond the vision they have for technology in their organisation and start to explore the practical steps they can take to make innovation something they do every day. Most businesses, if not all, should be excited about these new technologies,” concludes Mbiaketcha Nana.
Oracle Impact Kenya partners include Transys, CIS and Blockchain Asset Management.
