'Over 50 percent of all enterprise data to be managed autonomously in cloud by 2020'

"Over 50 percent of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously in the cloud by 2020 and 90 percent of all enterprise applications will include Artificial Intelligence-based capability." This was stated by Shariq Rehman, Country Managing Director, Oracle Pakistan in an interview.
According to him, autonomous cloud is the future of IT as it brings significant benefits in a number of ways. It can lower costs through reducing administration costs up to 80 percent with complete automation of operations and tuning, or reducing runtime costs up to 70 percent by paying only for resources needed at any given time. It enables companies to deploy new apps in minutes versus months, allowing them to save tens of thousands of dollars and faster innovation.
"All of this will free up your resources which were busy in day to day operations and can be redeployed towards activities that provide higher value to your business, like innovation, and better customer service," he added.
Explaining the benefits Pakistan can derive from autonomous cloud, he said Pakistan has always faced the brain drain issue. Considering autonomous cloud will provide a lot of liberty for the limited human capital we have in Pakistan. Because it is a cloud, organizations will just need to pay for the resources they are using, rather than investing on a CAPEX (capital expenditure) model upfront.
Clarifying the difference between automation and autonomous, he said that automation is about operating or controlling a system or process using set rules instead of human intervention, but one still needs to take action if something out of the ordinary happens.
"Autonomous, on the other hand, is about something that is self-governing and quite independent," he said, adding: "Take cars for example; many of us drive automatic cars - where the gearbox and many other functions are automatic. Their workings have been optimised to work more smoothly and minimise effort, but you cannot expect to get anywhere in an automatic car without a driver, it will not move.
That is the dream of the autonomous car - one that thinks for itself. The same goes for most current robotics where their movement is controlled by a set of rules, although some level of experimentation is required to take them to the next level and empower them with autonomous decision-making."
He said, "The fortunate thing is that while it has never been more challenging to lead a business or IT for that matter, there has never been more opportunity. By standing on the shoulders of others and leveraging autonomous cloud services, IT organisations and hence businesses can deliver new capabilities and more business value much faster than they would have ever dreamed possible before."
He said, "Already in Pakistan, there is a growing list of customers who have already shifted their different workloads to Oracle Cloud and started expanding their footprint. In line with this, we see a huge potential here for businesses adopting autonomous technologies, especially in manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education and we are already seeing a positive traction in all these industries."
This is a totally new category of IT, but we are seeing incredible interest from our customer base. Just consider, while it took approximately 50 years for electricity to be adopted by 60 percent of US households, it took cell phones only about 10 years and smartphones only about five years to reach the same penetration."