Small businesses savvy about digital transformation

Greater difference across industries when it comes to cloud adoption than between organisations of different sizes within the same industry sector, survey finds

A survey of the use of cloud services by Australian and New Zealand businesses undertaken by IDC and commissioned by Oracle has shown a surprising level of maturity in the understanding, and implementation of, digital transformation among smaller Australian businesses.

The survey encompassed about 250 businesses from about 10 person operations upwards.

According to Adam Dodds, IT Services and Cloud Research Director, IDC in Australia and New Zealand about 80 per cent of organisations surveyed have begun the digital transformation journey, and 90 per cent have a clear intent to exploit cloud computing services as part of that transformation.

“What was really interesting is that it does not matter whether you are a business of 10 seats on 8000 seats the intent around the reasons why and what they are doing a very similar,” Dodds said.

He said IDC was seeing greater difference across industries in the adoption of these cloud services than between organisations of different sizes within the same industry sector.

Tim Scott, sales director — Oracle cloud platform, said a number of small companies were making use of Oracle cloud services to run their business.

“We find that some of the most innovative and biggest adopters are in the smaller end of town,” he said.

“We’ve been working with some amazing companies like SuiteBox in New Zealand. They’re an organisation that provides customers with software to run video telephony and document collaboration. They're using our Java cloud services and database cloud services to run their entire platform on.”

Another company, Sutton Tools Australia, a family-owned business, is also using Oracle cloud services to run its core business, Dodds said.

“Those are two organisations you probably would not expect to be choosing Oracle,” Scott said.

Dodds said that many small businesses relied on self-research to educate themselves about digital transformation and to plan and execute a strategy.

“We are also seeing associations stepping up and offering guidance in this space, and we are also seeing financial advisors looking to evolve their propositions as they themselves become disintermediated by some of the cloud products that are taking over their workload.”

He added that businesses often developed a false sense of their own maturity in regard to their state of digital transformation, and said it was important to get independent assessment.

“Having that maturity assessed becomes quite important because it becomes a credible metric for how they can evolve moving forward. And as they move forward it gives them a key bunch of characteristics to focus on...

“Ultimately, understanding their maturity as a business and their cadence — the speed at which they can act and react and innovate — these are universally important metrics that help the business understand what it could be tomorrow.”

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