January 14, 2014 – theCUBE Conversation with Harish Venkat of Oracle.

.

Pressure to transform IT

There is a lot of pressure within many organizations to transform IT in order to meet the demands of doing business today.Companies choosing to let early adopters have the first crack at this transformation are putting themselves at risk of getting left behind.

“At a strategy level everyone is caring about the top line and bottom line. We all hear doing more with less, now we want to do even better with less. From an IT strategy perspective their budgets are constantly slashed as a percentage of revenue as companies are struggling to make their top line numbers. There is no time to wait around to develop your custom map to give yourself an edge, competitors are going with packaged apps and there are so many vendors in the marketplace. If you are not one of the early adopters you are going to be looking at a very bleak future.” explained Harish Venkat, Senior Director of Business Development at Oracle, in a recent chat with SiliconANGLE founder and CEO John Furrier.

As companies look at transforming their IT department several concerns arise including the notion of lock-in and lack of choices. One company that is often cited as the lead offender in regards to lock-in is Oracle.

When asked about customer’s lock-in concerns Venkat said, “In all of our engineered products there is the question, are we locked-in, the reality is you’re not. The components are all based on open standards. You can buy all the components we have put together for engineered systems and build it your own.”

In total companies have two choices when it comes to ERP, custom map their IT transformation or seek out partnership with a vendor.

“The fact that we are able to do that [provide IT solutions] pretested with our software and our application that’s the advantage Oracle is able to bring to the table,” Venkat said when asked about the distinct advantage Oracle offers customers.

In a world requiring  immediate results it appears that partnering may be the best solution.