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‘We have to continuously reinvent ourselves’: Oracle ANZ chief Valery Lanovenko

‘We have to continuously reinvent ourselves’: Oracle ANZ chief Valery Lanovenko

Explains the drivers behind the company’s new mission statement

Credit: Oracle

Redwood is both a system and a set of values that we will bring to every customer touchpoint we have over the next several years

Valery Lanovenko, Oracle

“We are going through a process of renewal; we have to continuously reinvent ourselves and earn our place in our customers’ hearts and minds.” 

This is the key message Valery Lanovenko, managing director for Australia and New Zealand, shares at this year’s Oracle Modern Cloud Day in Sydney.

“We are putting customers at the heart of everything we do,” says Lanovenko. 

“We put ourselves in your shoes and predict what needs and expectations you have of your cloud, your infrastructure, and business apps. It's all about data,” he notes. 

This, he stresses, is reflected in the company’s new mission: “To help people see data in new ways, discover new insights, unlock endless possibilities.”

“We are at an inflection point,” he says, of this shift.

He talks about Oracle’s Redwood, the company’s next generation user-experience design language.

“It is both a system and a set of values that we will bring to every customer touchpoint we have over the next several years.”

According to Lanovenko, the changes in products, services, and attitude are the biggest shifts he has seen at Oracle since he joined the company 10 years ago.

He notes that Oracle has its Generation 2 Cloud region already available in Sydney. Another cloud region is planned for Melbourne in early 2020, for customers in Australia and New Zealand.

He also shares that Oracle plans to launch an Oracle cloud infrastructure region every 23 days over the next 15 months, to have a global footprint of 36 regions worldwide by the end of 2020.

“It is important to remember that not all clouds are created equal.” 

Oracle, he points out, has reimagined the cloud and built it with enterprise customers in mind, based on what customers said were important to them. 

He says customers want to have choice, from public cloud, hybrid cloud, and public cloud.

“This will give you ultimate flexibility and choice on how you want to deploy cloud at your own pace and right price point, and covers all four layers of cloud - IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and DaaS.”

“This completeness is important because most organisations play at more than just one layer, ” he explains.

Credit: Oracle

It is important for organisations to arm themselves with the best possible tools, not the tools of yesterday, says Andrew Sutherland, senior vice president business development, technology license and systems, Oracle Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific.

“I would contend every business is becoming a business of managing the information of wealth around it,” says Sutherland. 

“We use information for every aspect in our lives.”

He further adds that, “Computers multiplied our brain capacity, and we can acquire, manage, store and analyse insights much greater.”

“We need very high performance as more digital information came to our business,” he says. “The sheer volume is greater than anybody predicted.”

“Every organisation is a digital business and we need to be able to scale and perform at another level. We need a new way of how we make our assets perform digitally.”

“Data is the oil of the information age...In the old economy, if you turn up the price of oil, you can dampen economic activity. In the digital economy, if you turn up cost of data...you will start to dampen the process of innovation.”

Sutherland stresses, “We need a whole new way of managing information that is cheaper and high scale, at the same time secure. Our data is becoming, along with our people, one of our most important assets. 

This is the reason why Oracle has set up a new division called Oracle Gen2 Cloud, where their second generation cloud was designed from scratch.

He says companies have heritage (“we don’t call them legacy anymore”) systems and they make sure it is easy as possible for customers to migrate existing systems and get benefits of performance and security.

“Our most fundamental responsibility is to protect our customers’ security and data,” he states .

Thus, throughout Gen2 Cloud, they are embedding AI. “There is no other way to keep information secure unless we use AI.”

He discusses how intelligent business apps are causing a profound shift on how businesses are being managed.

Businesses are all about making decisions, he says. “It is difficult to make the right decisions every time, but you can make the best decision.”

Through these intelligent apps, there can be data driven suggestions in every part of the business.

The modern Line of Business (LOB) manager is different from the middle managers of the past who were “the subject of mockery in 1970s sitcoms,'' says Sutherland.

The middle manager today is the fountain of innovation as they expect to see the outliers, and observe where opportunities are, and must be able to drive up ideas for innovation.

They need the tools to do this, and this tool is not the spreadsheet.

Everybody’s job is spent managing information, he says. “A database that looks after itself, combined with analytics and visualisation, is a real tool for innovation.”

A panel discussion shares lessons learned on data governance.

Sanja Marais, general manager technology and innovation at Aspen Medical, shares that their company worked on the Ebola response and works with the World Health Organization in running field offices.

“We work in remote parts of the world with a mobile workforce,” she says. 

“We had information but no insight,” she adds. “We literally ripped and replaced eight heritage systems and put them all in one application, in Oracle.”

“Harnessing data globally makes us agile in managing our teams.”

Lara Ariell, chief financial officer at Inland Revenue Department, shares the perspective of innovation through the cloud in the public sector.

“We have the opportunity to invest on behalf of the New Zealand government,” she explains. “For every dollar that gets spent, we leverage it on behalf of New Zealand agencies by adopting common processes and SaaS. 

“Basically, we spend NZ dollars once, and everything we do we will share with other agencies,” she explains.

“We are benefitting potentially the whole of New Zealand government.”

Sanja Marais, general manager technology and innovation at Aspen Medical; Matt Faries, chief information officer at AFG Australian Finance Group; and Lara Ariell, chief financial officer at Inland Revenue Department.Credit: Oracle
Sanja Marais, general manager technology and innovation at Aspen Medical; Matt Faries, chief information officer at AFG Australian Finance Group; and Lara Ariell, chief financial officer at Inland Revenue Department.

The author attended Modern Cloud Day 2019 in Sydney as a guest of Oracle.

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Tags strategyOracledata governanceleadershipValery LanovenkoAndrew Sutherland

More about Aspen MedicalAustraliaAustralian Finance GroupEastInland RevenueModernOracleTwitterWorld Health Organization

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