Irish companies behind the curve in cloud computing

Irish companies and organisations are lagging other markets in their embrace of cloud computing, according to Jon Paul, regional director, Oracle Ireland.

However, they have the ability to “leapfrog” ahead of competitors when they do move to the cloud.

“We’re not seeing a huge rush to the public cloud in Ireland,” he acknowledged in an interview at Oracle’s annual user event, OpenWorld, adding that the Irish as well as UK markets tend to lag other regions such as the US.

“But because of the nature of Ireland - organisations are smaller generally, and it’s a smaller economy - we’re able to leapfrog quite quickly when adopting new technology.”

Paul pointed to customers like the Ordnance Survey of Ireland that can use the latest technologies to surpass much larger maps organisations in bigger countries.

“They’re doing hugely innovative things with their mapping service, and using the Oracle platform, they’ve been able to leapfrog two or three generations of mapping technology and get ahead of other countries,” he said. “So we are seeing pockets of huge innovation.”

On a public cloud - an internet-based service offered by many large technology companies, including Oracle - customers can go online to access applications, a full computing platform and hardware infrastructure as a service, rather than buying and owning that hardware and software.

However, Irish companies are beginning to move to “hybrid” environments where some activities may run on a public cloud, and others are in-house or on a private cloud environment, managed by Oracle.

Oracle have three customers running financial operations through a such a “managed cloud” environment, either on their own premises, or in Oracle’s data centre. Irish clients still like to have service level agreements (SLAs) and clear “deliverables”, Paul says.

And many stick with the older model of buying and running Oracle products.

“We’re seeing huge growth still in our traditional business in selling companies licences for products they’re going to use themselves.”

But new in-house research conducted by Oracle Ireland indicates there is a developing market for a transition to the cloud and for the use of what Oracle calls “engineered systems” - in which Oracle hardware comes with software built in at disk or even processor level.

This enables hardware to perform tasks, such as handling databases or performing complex data analysis, far more quickly.

This capability will be necessary as businesses start to produce huge amounts of data from websites, devices, sensors and other sources, he says.

Already, organisations have more data than they know what to do with, says Paul, and are looking for ways in which they can glean useful information to enhance their operations.

In an ideal world, he says, companies could start from a technological “green field” position and shift hardware and software needs to the public cloud and gain cost benefits immediately, he said.

“But most companies have their own staff, legacy systems, maybe their own data centre,” says Paul. So they will initially opt for hybrid approaches where some activities go to the cloud and some remain in-house.

An easy initial move is to shift database operations onto the cloud, enabling companies to get rid of servers and software.

Some Irish-based companies, such as Google and Aer Lingus, have moved niche areas of the business onto Oracle's cloud, using Oracle software as a service offerings for business to business and business to consumer activities, customer service, or human resource management and recruiting, Paul says.