By Freya Purnell
A global survey by SAP SE and Oxford Economics has shown that not only has the cloud become a primary IT delivery model, with 69 per cent of businesses expecting to make moderate to heavy cloud investments over the next three years, but companies are increasingly seeking specific business benefits from leveraging cloud.
Rather than simply opting for the cloud for productivity and efficiency, companies are increasingly looking to utilise its flexibility to generate innovation in supply chain, talent management, collaboration and analytics.
For the survey, Oxford Economics interviewed 200 executives from companies headquartered in 11 countries, including the United States, Brazil, Germany and China, and industries including banking/capital markets, retail, consumer products and telecommunications. The results were compared with the same survey undertaken in 2012.
Almost all respondents (99 per cent) say cloud computing is now part of their company’s business strategy, and more than two-third plan to increase their migration of core business functions to the cloud. In fact, within three years, nearly all respondents say that innovation, R&D and supply chain will be “somewhat or mostly” cloud-based.
Nearly a third of respondents said the adoption of cloud had had a transformative impact on their business performance, and 59 per cent said they now use the cloud to better manage and analyse data, representing a 10 per cent increase over the 2012 results.
