Cloud is the future. The cloud business over the next ten years will be accounting for over 80% of companies’ innovation, said Adebayo Sanni, country manager, Oracle (Nigeria).

Sanni joined Oracle in 2013 as Country Leader for Nigeria. In this role he provides leadership for Oracle’s operations, growth and profitability in Nigeria, including driving sales, consulting and business growth. With more than 20 years’ experience in the ICT industry in countries in and outside Africa, Bayo has acquired expertise in strategy, sales and business development.

His experience includes holding the CEO position at XTI Data, responsible for defining the company’s corporate strategy which, during his tenure, delivered double digit growth for the group. Prior to this, he was the regional Channel Director for CISCO Systems Africa where he helped build Cisco’s channels across Africa.

Bayo holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Electronics Engineering from the Obafemi Awolowo University.

In an interview with Nigeria CommunicationsWeek in view of the Oracle Open World 2016 held in the United States of America in September, Sanni said that cloud technology is the way to go.

Significances of the Conference
“It was awesome. We saw over 60 000 customers, across multiple countries. Quite a number of exciting things we were able to see. Last week alone brought over $200m worth of revenue to the city of San Francisco closing down almost three streets. It was really exciting to be there. Oracle Nigeria had a good representation of customers from different sectors like the banking sector, oil & gas, from the government participating in the experience. One of the CEOs with the executive director of one of the top banks in Nigeria was there.

“We had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with the CEO of Oracle, Mark Hurd, and we were really excited about it. Most of the customers are excited about the possibility of the future and the future to Oracle is cloud. Some of our customers that have not used Oracle are now thinking of using Oracle and leveraging the cloud.

How Companies in Nigerians Have Faired On Cloud Technology
The first thing we need to understand is what cloud is to us. We should look at why are we moving into cloud and we should understand the basics of cloud. Cloud is a generational shift and this is the best option for driving growth. Going back to your question, we go into the small and medium businesses who are the key drivers of the economy of this country.

“Oracle traditionally has focused on the enterprise of this country but what we found was the need to get in the cloud and the journey of Oracle is really simple for companies that have not been able to use Oracle to now move from a real CAPEX investment to on pay as you go model whatever your kind of enterprise, Oracle is able to give you services as you go. You’ll be able to purchase cloud as you go, you’ll be able to significantly reduce implementation cost, reduce implementation time with Oracle and many more services.

“These are some of the benefits you’ll benefit from Oracle’s huge investment in cloud. For example Oracle’s investment into R&D for Fiscal 16 was 5,787 billion USD or 16 pct. of total revenues.  19 data centres are driving this solution and this is a great advantage of registering with Oracle. So one side, we made the highest investment by any cloud company today it has turned us into the fastest growing cloud company in the world with 82% year on year growth. Our objective is to take the benefits of cloud solutions across the African continent and Nigeria is a key part of that outreach.

The Adoption Rate in the Last One Year
“The adoption rate has started increasing. We are still in the early stage for Nigeria. We understand the data challenge; we understand that security has been a worry for a lot of customers. Those are worries that Oracle has looked into and significantly addressed. The adoption is not yet where we want it to be but it is significantly increasing from where we were six (6) months ago or even three (3) months ago.
 
“The adoption rate is growing fast because more and more customers have realised that their security concerns have been addressed by Oracle. Oracle has provided solution to them; solutions that no other company had been able to. The biggest challenge in the public sector is that the government wants data to remain in the country, Oracle launched, as part of this new announcement, the Oracle Cloud Machine.

“This creates access to the public cloud but puts an Oracle Cloud Machine on the premises of the customer that would protect the data from going outside. It gives them access to the public cloud without losing the data. There is no other company that is able to provide this today. We are working towards introducing the cloud machine in Nigeria soon.

Nigeria in Recession and Oracle’s Innovation
“I think it would be impossible for any company to say they are not affected by the current economic state of Nigeria today. Understanding that at this point means survival is key. This is more why when you think about survival, you want to outpace your competition but you want to do it at a reduced cost. Using technology continues to be the key driver there. This where cloud becomes more and more important because it allows organisations to still be able to compete but do it in a smarter and more cost efficient way.

Oracle’s Model for SMEs, Multi-Nationals
“The Oracle cloud is open to any organization; from a small organisation to the largest enterprise we have in Nigeria. The beauty of it is when you talk about pay-as-you-go it means you pay for what you need when you need it but pretty much, it is not industry dependent; it is not customer dependent; it is not number of employee dependent. Oracle cloud is available to all our Nigerian customers.

Cloud as Cost Saving Measure for Companies?
“Absolutely! Like I said for a company that wants to gain market share, reduce cost and execute the business in the fastest way, the only option they have when you are looking at technology is cloud. Cloud is the future. The cloud business over the next ten years will be accounting for over 80% of companies’ innovation.

Key Announcements at Oracle Open-World Conference 2016
“There were a lot of announcements made by Oracle but there are some major ones that Nigeria should take a look at. The first is the Oracle Database 12C release 2 in the Oracle Cloud with the launch of the Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service. This latest release provides organisations of all sizes access to the world’s fastest and reliable and cost effective data technology in the open cloud environment.

Why Is This Important?
“Oracle is known as a database company from a foundation point of view. Our database is seen as the absolute best and fastest in the world. What we are offering customers is the ability to have Oracle database in the cloud with these innovations. Oracle database is 20 years ahead of the Amazon Web services.

“This was tested and proven. It runs 35 times faster for online transaction processing (OLTP) and 1000 times faster for mixed workloads when you compare that to Amazon database as a service. What we are offering our customers is the ability to have access to the fastest database at a cheaper price.

“Oracle also announced the broadest array of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings in the industry, which includes bare metal cloud servers that are 11 times faster and 20% cheaper than the fastest solution by any competitor in the market today. Also, the new Oracle cloud services enables businesses to fundamentally transform the way they generate insights from people, processes and delivers them to the users with intuitive visualisation, and adaptive learning.

“This is possible through industries only end to end solutions for business analytics which is actually called Oracle Analytic Cloud. Those are the three major announcements that were made. The advantage that these bring is that it positions Oracle in the market in a class of its own.That puts us in the class of our own. With Data as a Service, with Infrastructure as a Service running analytics as a cloud service today, complete Oracle’s ability to offer end-to-end cloud services to our customers on one side, on another side to continue while we are still providing the on-premise solution to the customer.

“The third thing that we are able to do that no other company has been able to do is the ability to take the on-premise and the cloud and put both in the same environment and move from one to another in a very seamless way. This is one of the big advantages we are offering a lot of our customers in Nigeria today. The ability to make decision. The customer is the one deciding what they want and how they want.

Mini OpenWorld Forum in Nigeria
“Absolutely! The way we’ve done it every year, Oracle has its OpenWorld conference held sometime in September every year, it’s impossible to bring every customer across the globe to these conferences so what we’ve done is any customer that was unable to make being in San Francisco has the opportunity to attend  what we call the Digital Day. It is going to hold on the 1st and 2nd of November 2016. This enables us to bring all our customers in Nigeria together where we will specifically talk about the announcements from OpenWorld and how these translates into direct benefits for the Nigerian market.

How Oracle Aligns With FG’s ICT Agenda
“I think collaboration is the way we can truly support the government to actualize a lot of these initiatives. When the minister visited, we talked about a lot of initiatives that we are going to work on together. One of these is working with NITDA in terms of several events. We are also looking at ways to work with the government and to ensure that we can support the government as they drive revenue.

“The government wants to eliminate wastage and drive efficiency. The easiest way that the government can achieve that is through technology. We are looking at ways to support the government in the quest in driving efficiency, eliminating inefficiencies, automating the processes the government has today, and also looking at how can we create centres that will support in driving skills.

Skills are critical to cloud adoption. How has Oracle faired in helping Nigerians adopt skills essential for adopting the cloud technology?

“Part of what Oracle is doing is the introduction of specific science subjects in the secondary school right from the onset allowing young students to embrace technology right from a young age. We go into the University and institutions of higher learning, most of them in Lagos state have all adopted Oracle’s Java language as one of the standard courses in those institutions. We are also partnering with Lagos, Akwa Ibom and Edo states to train graduates on e-business and database that allows these graduates to be employable by either the government or by some of Oracle’s customers. The objective is to train the graduates. We are also training some of the existing employees of some state governments for better governance.

“Another thing Oracle is doing is the internship program for fresh graduates where they undergo a rigorous one year training leading to retaining 25% of them; with the remaining 75% being offered to our customers and partner base so that they in turn can take that Oracle knowledge and impact the organisation they are working for.

“The reality is that we have to work towards enhancing the skills of over a 100 million youth. The responsibility for this task lies with both the government as well as private organisations. It takes a joint effort. Government needs to do more, the private organisations need to do more and we will continue to do more.

Where Do You See The Sector, Nigeria’s Economy In The Next Couple Of Years?

“As I mentioned to you earlier, cloud is a generational shift. It’s the future. The adoption has started in Nigeria. It’s in its early phase. The reality is not in choice but in the way that technology is going to impact organizations and governments. The reason is today IT budget is shrinking; 80% of that IT budget is spent on maintaining old equipment. What cloud brings to table is the elimination of old equipment, elimination of spending money on the maintenance but focusing on driving innovation. Cloud is the way that companies will go because this is what offers companies the ability to innovate, to gain market share, and to significantly reduce cost.

“There’s no organization that has that priority and it won’t think about cloud. We will be able to provide access to the most rural areas, give farmers access to be able to understand what’s going in the rest of the world and also allow mobile solutions to be driven in all areas with cloud. What we would eventually achieve is that we would be able to cut 80% of IT budget, which would now be used to drive innovation. With cloud today, we can connect you within a forty eight hour period”.