Olufunlayo Ajayi is the country manager of Oracle Corporation in Nigeria, part of the an American multinational computer technology corporation.
In the last three years of her stewardship, Ajayi’s leadership prowess has rubbed off on Oracle’s presence in Nigeria as the Company’s presence permeates into both private and public corporations.
With the present emphasis on cloud computing, Ajayi believes the vintage is opening new vistas for Oracle with prerequisite solutions and hardware to leverage on. She spoke to Peter Ugwu.

Oracle’s Hype on Cloud Business
Oracle’s strategy is to reduce complexity and simplify Information Technology, offering choice and flexibility with the most comprehensive, modern and secure portfolio of cloud products and services: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.
We are focused on offering our clients greater agility, less risk, and lower costs through Oracle Cloud solutions.

Oracle Cloud Roadmap and Inadequate Broadband Infrastructure
The Nigerian market has been very receptive, with lots of interest being expressed in cloud solutions.
However, the issue of security is what has slowed the adoption of cloud computing, especially in Nigeria. Somehow, they prefer to have their cloud in Nigeria.
We intend to partner with other service provideres in Nigeria to be able to provide whatever we need.
We had some concerns about that, but now we have broadband companies and other investors like MainOne, Glo1, MTN, who can actually help solve the problem.
We have solutions as far as that is concerned to enable organizations achieve their purpose almost in a seamless manner.

Apprehensions among Customers
Basically, up to now the fear has been centered on security. But it is like a perception. The way we have our yahoo mail, Gmail and host of others hosted outside the country is the same way that the cloud works.
They are already in the cloud; in other words we have already been in the cloud for years. That perception appears to be dying down now, but there are other challenges like regulatory compliance and concern over the evaluation of cloud operations.

Containing Intellectual Property Theft
Security and reliability are critical aspects of any discussion about the cloud.  Organizations need to be able to trust that their cloud solution protects and controls access to private information. 
Oracle provides world-class security that offers security and encryption at every layer of the technology stack, utilizing the latest physical and logical data security and protection solutions. 
We provide federated and consolidated identity management and access control across clouds, systems and on-premise applications. 
And Oracle’s best practice processes, controls and tools help customers cost-effectively and proactively comply with the regulatory requirements across industries and countries.

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The Growth of Oracle Business in Nigeria
Oracle has been active in the West African market for many years and officially opened the Oracle office in Lagos in 2010. 
We have seen tremendous growth and adoption of Oracle technologies during this time.  We are very strong in the telco and financial services industries and through our continued focus on innovation to simplify IT, we are committed to continued investment and growth across all sectors in Nigeria.

Shifting Focus from Hardware To Software
Oracle maintains commitment to both software and hardware. Oracle is simplifying IT by engineering hardware and software to work together—from servers and storage to database and middleware to applications.
The idea behind Oracle’s integrated technology stack is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There are best-of-breed products throughout the stack, and every product and every layer of the technology stack is designed and engineered to work together.

Oracle With Several Solutions
Yes Oracle has a large set of solutions and products to offer customers, but our focus is to simplify IT so that customers can use technology for business innovation, not just for business as usual.
While Oracle is committed to open technology that works within a heterogeneous IT environment, its technology is engineered specifically for the
Oracle stack, with solutions fine-tuned and optimized between, within, and across the layers. 
The Oracle technology stack optimizes performance by including manageability, security and reliability engineered into every layer. The result is IT better than what our customers can build on their own. 
Oracle is also simplifying IT by investing in best-of- breed components and engineering them to work together for specific industries.
So instead of customers focusing their technology and expertise on managing complex IT, they can focus on the innovation to drive their business.

Oracle’s Visions for SMBs in Nigeria
I have been the Oracle’s country manager for three years. As a company our aim is to ensure that we bring affordable and efficient enterprises to Small and medium businesses (SMBs) in Nigeria. We are also involved in activities like providing Oracle Academy to universities.
What we do is that we train the lecturers so they can also train the students. As a company with presence in over 142 countries, we want to stamp our footprint in Nigeria as well.
To stress further on our vision, going forward is the key thing, especially to help our customers build their businesses with best-of-breed technology solutions.

Building Datacenter in Nigeria
We have a datacenter at our headquarters in San Francisco. It’s not about building datacenters, what the emphasis should be on is how we are adding value to the growth of the economy.
We want to bring Oracle’s innovation to the market, to support business innovation and growth in Nigeria.

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Motivation to Focus on Nigeria Market
Nigeria is an emerging market offering vast opportunity to investors from around the world.
We believe that Oracle has best-of-breed, world class solutions that can assist businesses in Nigeria to realize their full potential and support their business requirements as they grow.

Oracle Solutions and Others in the Cloud Competing World
Unlike competitors with limited cloud options – for example software as a service only, virtualization only, or hardware only – Oracle provides the broadest, most complete and most integrated set of cloud offerings in the industry.  
Only Oracle enables customers to choose between on-premise or in-cloud solutions – and move applications and data seamlessly between themselves. 
Our cloud offerings span public and private clouds and extend to every level of our product portfolio – applications, middleware, database, servers, storage, networking and associated operating systems and virtualization software.

Virtualization and Moving to the Cloud
Cloud computing encompasses a wide range of services, beginning with infrastructure as a service, and escalating up to platform as a service and software as a service.
Each level should be able to operate independently of the layers below it, which are separate and automatically maintained.
The journey to cloud computing doesn’t happen overnight. It must not only benefit IT organizations but also the business user who consumes cloud services.
Virtualization is just one phase of cloud computing.  A cloud strategy must be implemented using a phased approach, aligned to business pace, where each phase can be mapped to measurable business goals and benefits.