FALL 2017 START YOUR ENGINES

HOLISTIC REMEDY
Online and off, customers want it all.
Can you deliver?

+
ERP and SMBs ›
Artificial Intelligence ›
India Rising ›
Dr. Khalid Tadlaoui,
Vice President of Information
Technology, Nahdi
 EDITORIAL
Editor in Chief Aaron Lazenby
aaron.lazenby@oracle.com
Managing Editor Jan Rogers
Deputy Editor Blair Campbell
Contributors David Baum, David Carr, Bobbie Hartman,
Alan Joch, Monica Mehta, Kate Pavao, Rob Preston,
Alison Weiss, Minda Zetlin
Copy Editors Claire Breen, Karen Perkins
DESIGN
Vice President, Brand Creative Francisco G Delgadillo
Design Director Richard Merchán
Senior Designer Arianna Pucherelli
Senior Production Manager Sheila Brennan
Designer Jaime Ferrand
Production Designer Kathy Cygnarowicz
PUBLISHING
Publisher and Audience Development Director Karin Kinnear
karin.kinnear@oracle.com, +1.650.506.1985
Audience Development Manager Jennifer S. Kurtz
jennifer.s.kurtz@oracle.com
Social Media Manager Taline Vertians Felix
ADVERTISING SALES
Western and Central US, LAD, and Canada Tom Cometa
tom.cometa@oracle.com, +1.510.339.2403
Eastern US, EMEA and APAC Mark Makinney
mark.m.makinney@oracle.com, +1.805.709.4745
Mailing-List Rentals Contact your sales representative

SUBSCRIPTIONS
Subscriptions are complimentary for qualified individuals
who complete the form found at oracle.com/profit. To
update email address, please send an email to customer
service at profit@omeda.com.
PROFIT MAGAZINE CUSTOMER SERVICE
profit@omeda.com
Copyright © 2017, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted
or otherwise reproduced without permission from
the editors. Oracle does not provide any warranty as
to the accuracy of any information provided through
Profit. PROFIT IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS.
ORACLE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES,
WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. IN NO EVENT SHALL
development, release, and timing of any features or
functionality described for Oracle’s products remains
at the sole discretion of Oracle. Oracle and Java are
registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other
names may be trademarks of their respective owners
ORACLE PRODUCTS
+1.800.633.0675 (US/Canada).

PRIVACY
Oracle Publishing allows sharing of our mailing list with
selected third parties. If you prefer that your mailing
address or email address not be included in this program,
please contact customer service at profit@omeda.com.
The content contained in this publication is for
informational purposes only and may not be incorporated
into a contract or agreement.
ORACLE BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OF ANY KIND International: Go to oracle.com/corporate/contact/
ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF OR RELIANCE ON ANY global.html to find the phone number for your region.
INFORMATION PROVIDED HEREIN. The preceding is
intended to outline our general product direction. It is ORACLE SERVICES
+1.888.283.0591 (US/Canada)
intended for information purposes only, and may not be
incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment
to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should
not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The
FALL 2017
powerful. Will we be
ready for it?
28
HOLISTIC INSIDE ORACLE

REMEDY 17
Cloud services help create Future Investments
India’s commitment
a healthy blend of digital
CONTENTS

to cloud, startups,
and bricks-and-mortar and smart cities
operations for Saudi on the agenda at
Arabia’s leading pharmacy. Oracle OpenWorld
in New Delhi

EDITOR'S NOTE PERSPECTIVES

5 24
Start Your Engines Passion. Discipline.
Get started. Get Freedom.
better. Get ahead. How digital inno-
vation is raising the
NEED TO KNOW stature of SMBs as
the primary engines
8 of business growth
When Intelligent and innovation.
Machines Do all
the Work, What 39
Will We Do all Day? Personal Advantage
Buying time in Five strategies on
an AI world how SMBs can stay
close to their
13 customers and scale
Intelligent Choices simultaneously
AI will only get more

3 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APH: ABDULR AHMAN BAYASHOUT/ THE VERBATIM AGENCY
FALL 2017

8 17
CONTENTS

70 BIG IDEAS 63
On-Demand World Tools for
How SMBs can 54 Growth
prosper in an Pay it Forward SMBs and start-
on-demand A strong cultural ups positioning
economy foundation is themselves for an
behind Payscout's IPO or acquisition
44 successful move need finance and
FEATURE into the VR com- accounting solutions
44 merce market. that work together
Destination: Cloud 58 seamlessly.
Soma Bay gets lofty Stumbling Blocks
results by moving The four biggest
its JD Edwards challenges SMBs
EnterpriseOne face.
system to Oracle
Cloud IaaS.

4 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APHS: COURTESY OF RINSPEED, DAVID DEGNER / THE VERBATIM AGENCY, SUNNY L AMBA /SILVERHUB
FALL 2017

We have crossed the starting line and

are moving toward something better.
We’re pleased to have our readers
along with us as we refine and improve
EDITOR’S NOTE

this new editorial product with the

goal of getting ahead of where we
were a year ago.

We're off to the races. After Profit as a small business oper-

nearly a year of thinking and ating within the (much) larger
tinkering (and a few short Oracle organization. We have
months of production), the some pressures that should be
new-look Profit is here. This familiar to leaders at a startup

START YOUR latest version of the magazine

is most obviously defined by
or small-to-medium business
(SMB): budget constraints,

ENGINES
AARON LAZENBY, Editor in Chief, Profit
aaron.lazenby@oracle.com
three elements: a new design,
a new publishing platform, and
a new web experience.
But the process of shift-
ing Profit to a digital business
required more than a new logo
and new design templates.
I have often said that I view
revenue targets (that our inves-
tors are tracking), compressed
time frames, administrative
demands that compete with
our core mission, and an ad
hoc technology strategy.
In this way, it feels as if our
digital transformation paral-

5 PROFIT FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APH: BOB MORRIS

 lels the challenges faced by the
FALLL 2017
growing businesses we talked
to this past quarter. Indeed, the
Profit transformation process
demanded that we completely
revisit our production process. We
EDITOR’S NOTE
had to review our staffing require-
ments to make sure we have the
right skills on the team. We had to
integrate the digital platform with
other internal systems, such as
Oracle Marketing Cloud and ana-
lytics. We had to reengineer our
sales process.
The Profit editorial staff chan-
neled those efforts into some of
the content you’ll find in this inau-
gural digital edition of the maga-
zine. For example, readers will find
new “Perspectives” from Oracle
experts (Steve Cox, David Goltz,
and Jasbir Singh) bringing their
experience to bear on the subject
of growing companies. There’s
coverage of the work being done
by the Oracle Startup Cloud
Accelerator program in India (see
the revamped “Inside Oracle” sec-
tion) and the impact of integrated
finance and accounting on compa-
nies moving toward IPO or venture
funding. Payscout CEO Cleveland
6 PROFIT JD EDWARDS SPECIAL ISSUE FALL 2017
Our digital transformation parallels the
challenges faced by the growing businesses
we talked to this past quarter.
Brown makes a strong case for
culture as the defining element of
success for growing businesses.
And various experts share their
thoughts on the challenges facing
SMBs and some advice on how to
get ahead.
The dominant, common theme
shared among these stories is the
vital, liberating role cloud comput-
ing plays in growing businesses.
Cloud provides an easier entry
point for companies looking to
embrace enterprise computing
technology. The price point is
right for the budget, and proven
business processes help bring
some discipline to an organization
looking to evolve or expand. And
having the option to add applica-
tions and ingest upgrades incre-
mentally means cloud can move at
the pace of the business.
Working closely with the Oracle
SMB team, we learned they have
identified three critical stages in
the development of a growing
business. Get started. Get better.
Get ahead. Feeding those con-
cepts back into the work the Profit
team has done over the past year,
we have crossed the starting line
and are moving toward something
better. We’re pleased to have our
readers along with us as we refine
and improve this new editorial
product with the goal of getting
ahead of where we were a year
ago. Please share your thoughts,
comments, and suggestions as
we race toward something new
and different.
 There’s a reason leading companies choose
Syntax as their ERP partner.
Many reasons, actually.

45+
Years of Experience
650+
Oracle ERP Customers
98%
Client Retention

ENTERPRISE MANAGED CONSULTING

CLOUD SERVICES SERVICES

THE AWARD WINNING PRIVATE

CLOUD BUILT AND TUNED FOR ERP syntax.com
 WHEN
BUYING TIME

INTELLIGENT
MACHINES DO
ALL OF OUR
WORK, WHAT
WILL WE DO
ALL DAY?
NEED TO KNOW

Whatever we humans
want the future to
be, AI can help us
accomplish this. A big
part of the problem
is we don’t talk
much about what we
actually want.
—MAX TEGMARK

8 ILLUSTR ATION: WES ROWELL

BUYING TIME
NEED TO KNOW
Idea Lab
ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Ridesharing companies are
already finding ways to occupy
passengers’ time—and make
more money. Passengers can
buy snacks from onboard
vending machines—sometimes
even trading their personal data
for snacks—and, in the case of
some Lyft customers, use the
company’s app to schedule
late-night Taco Bell stops along
the way home.
Now as self-driving cars
begin to hit the road, they will
bring even more market oppor-
tunities as everyone on board
becomes a passenger—and a
9 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
potential customer. Autonomous
vehicles will free up 250 mil-
lion hours of commuting time,
according to Intel research. How
will we use that time?
It’s possible that passengers
will watch ads in exchange for
traveling for free, says Frank
Rinderknecht, founder and CEO
of Rinspeed, a creative think
tank and mobility lab for the
automotive industry. Or, more
likely, “mobility service pro-
viders will use loyalty programs,
like the airlines, so depending
on your status you get free con-
nectivity—the latest Amazon
Prime films or Netflix or what-
ever—and if you’re a basic
member you pay for it or have
to watch ads.”
Rinspeed has offered up
another option. The Oasis con-
cept is a living room on wheels
with an armchair, a windshield
that can display augmented
realities, and even a little
garden. Of course, the Oasis
still features technology, such as
a virtual assistant that can help
passengers make dinner reser-
vations at a nearby restaurant
recommended by Facebook
friends or post photos of the
world passing by on their
Instagram feed. “It’s all up to
US$7
the user,” says Rinderknecht THE PREDICTED
of how passengers will spend SIZE IN TRILLIONS
their time moving forward.
OF DOLLARS OF
“It’s like in an airplane or on a
train; some people work, some THE PASSENGER
people read, some people ECONOMY BY THE
snooze off. You should have the YEAR 2050
possibility to do whatever you
Source: Intel
desire at the moment.”
More at rinspeed.eu.
—Kate Pavao
PHOTOGR APH: COURTESY OF RINSPEED
 Business Class
BUYING TIME
MY LIFE AS A CYBORG
Nearly 20 years ago, Kevin
Warwick, the professor
NEED TO KNOW
emeritus at Coventry and
Redding Universities known
as “Captain Cyborg,” got
his first implant.
His radio-frequency iden-
tification chip was larger
but similar to the one some
employees are getting now.
Chip implants are just the
next step for people who
already carry smartphones
with them everywhere they
go, Warwick argues, and
not only provide employees
with convenience to open
doors and buy snacks but
also provide employers
with important data and
extra security.
Warwick admits that
there are still some ques-
tions to consider; for
example, should employers
10 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
be allowed to pay chipped 56%
workers more? But he
says this shouldn’t stop PERCENTAGE
the march of progress. Of OF AUSTRALIAN
course, he says, when it
RESPONDENTS
comes to workplace pro-
ductivity, the real cyborg WHO SAID
advantage is still to come. THEY ARE
Just think about the advan- COMFORTABLE
tages of being able to PAYING WITH
communicate through
brainwaves, or being able
BIOMETRIC
to harness several human DATA—SUCH AS
brains together. “Brain cells RETINA SCANS—
want to communicate,” INSTEAD OF
he says. “The next step
PERSONAL
is giving the brain what
it wants.” IDENTIFICATION
More at 32market.com/ NUMBERS
public/32chip.html. Source: Visa
—Kate Pavao
PHOTOGR APH: COLIN ANDERSON/BLEND IMAGES/GET T Y IMAGES
 Lab Rat
BUYING TIME
FREEDOM
FROM CHOICE
NEED TO KNOW
+ and responding to nonur-
We make daily decisions
about everything from what
coffee to buy to what media
to consume (and on what
device). What can we gain
if we give up some of those
choices? That’s what Thrive
Global writer Shelby Lorman
wanted to know when she
automated decisions about
clothing, food, and media
diet for a week. She only
wore black turtlenecks and
jeans à la Steve Jobs, ate the
same salad for lunch, and
adhered to a predetermined
list of what to listen to, watch,
and read. The result? She
discovered she had been
11 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
wasting too much time on
inconsequential choices—
gent email—and says she
achieved more mental clarity
and brain power to tackle
important decisions. Even
after the experiment ended,
she continues to choose
reading over social media,
especially at commute time,
saying, “I’ve since read more
than I’ve read, truly, in years.”
Even though deciding not to
decide might free up more
time to pursue passions,
Lorman says she’s suspicious
of what computer automation
would do to her autonomy.
“I am not too keen on letting
an algorithm pick my outfits,”
she says.
More at journal.thrive-
global.com/@shelby.lorman.
—Monica Mehta
Research
BUYING
HAPPINESS
Want to be happier?
Pay someone to clean
your house or cut your
5 lawn, says a recent study in
the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. Researchers
NUMBER OF found a consistent
link
HOURS IN between buying time
A DAY THAT
and increased happiness
THE AVERAGE across incomes, demographics,
AMERICAN and geographies.
But it can be hard to spend on
CONSUMER
services. In a survey of 800 Dutch
SPENDS millionaires, just over half said they
ON MOBILE pay to outsource their to-do lists.
DEVICES “We want to feel that we can do it
all—even when it would make us
Source: Flurry
happier not to,” says Ashley Whillans,
the study’s lead author.
More at bit.ly/2wFZUXg.
—Bobbie Hartman
PHOTOGR APH: SHELBY LORMAN
 Need 2 Know
BUYING TIME

PLASTIC WORLD
Plastic bottles, coffee cups, lids, forks, and shopping bags make life a lot easier when we’re on
the go. But buying convenience has a negative impact on our landfills—and oceans.
8.3
NEED TO KNOW

Right now, says UC Santa Barbara’s Roland Geyer, an assistant professor in environmental science,
“the economics of recycled plastic don’t work” because cheap natural gas and crude oil make new
petroleum-based plastic products cheaper than recycled ones.
Clearly, our plastics problem needs a new solution. If we can’t curb our need for convenience, AMOUNT IN
can technology save us from the weight of our waste? Here are two different approaches. BILLION METRIC
TONS OF PLASTIC
BRING ON THE BOTS sort different types of plastics as ylene plastic into a clean, use- CREATED
Robots to the rescue? Denver, well—and, thanks to AI, it can able product—not an easy task
Colorado–based AMP Robotics keep getting better at its job. because polyethylene is diffi-
SINCE PLASTIC
recently combined artificial More at amprobotics.com. cult to degrade. But the team PRODUCTION
intelligence (AI) and robotics recently developed a prom- RAMPED UP IN
to help make recycling facilities PLASTIC POWER ising method using alkanes (a THE 1950S
more efficient. As co-mingled Could our cars run on our byproduct of the oil refining
Source: University
waste of all kinds travels along plastic trash someday soon? process) as catalysts to break of Georgia
a conveyor belt, the robot iden- Scientists at the Shanghai down the chemical more
tifies cartons and grabs them Institute of Organic Chemistry cheaply and efficiently.
using a robotic arm outfitted are looking to do just that: turn More at advances
with suction cups. the polyethylene plastic—used .sciencemag.org.
The robot works three times in toys, bags, and packaging— —Bobbie Hartman
faster than humans, which helps into fuel.
dramatically reduce sorting The process involves
costs. It could be deployed to breaking down the polyeth-

12 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APH: NOR A CAROL PHOTOGR APHY/GET T Y IMAGES
 On Topic is we don’t talk much ON OPEN
BUYING TIME
ON BABY STEPS:
about what we actu- You could easily pro- QUESTIONS:

INTELLIGENT ally want.” So let’s

start talking about it.
ON FREE TIME:
gram a modern air-
craft to know that it
should never, under
There are many
tough open ques-
tions that we still

CHOICES What will happen

once machines can’t
any circumstances,
fly into buildings. Or
need to answer if
we’re going to reap
NEED TO KNOW

just do a lot of our teach an industrial the benefits of AI

AI will only get more powerful.
jobs, but can out- robot that it’s not so while avoiding prob-
Will we be ready for it? smart us at all tasks? important to install a lems. And many of
If machines can pro- particular car part right these answers might
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) duce all that we need, now that it’s worth take decades to find,
raises not only technical questions but then we all can effec- crushing somebody. so it’s important
also ethical and philosophical ones. tively get a free vaca- ON ADDICTION: we start that safety
Should superhuman AI be controlled tion for the rest of our Many people have research now. If we
when it arrives—and if so, by whom? If lives. If a single power this very naïve idea have very powerful AI
robots are doing all of our work, how owns all the machines that if there’s a super- that is going to influ-
will humans find meaning? and everybody else intelligent machine ence us, let’s make
“Whatever we humans want the future to be, AI starves, that may be a they don’t like, they sure its goals are
can help us accomplish this,” says MIT professor Max less rosy scenario. will unplug it. But aligned with our own.
Tegmark, author of Life 3.0. “A big part of the problem ON CAUTION: they’re not going to ON POSITIVITY:
With more-powerful want to unplug any- I’m cautiously opti-
tech such as nuclear thing. They’re going mistic that we can
weapons, synthetic to love it. If today’s create an awesome
biology, or super- fairly low-tech smart- future with AI if we
human AI in partic- phones can persuade win this race between
ular, we don’t want to their owners to stare the growing power
learn from mistakes. at them for a large of the technology
We want to get things fraction of the day, a and the growing
right the first time superhuman AI could wisdom with which
because it might be really hack our human we manage it.
the only time we have. reward system. —Kate Pavao

13 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 ILLUSTR ATION: WES ROWELL

SPONSORED CONTENT
For more information, visit
www.informatica.com
Informatica builds foundation
for data-driven digital
transformation
Unleash the disruptive power of data to accelerate your
data-driven journey.
By Amit Walia, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer
at Informatica
D
igital transformation changes
expectations: businesses
want better service, faster
delivery, with less cost – and they
must transform to stay relevant.
Data holds the answers.
As a world leader in Enter-
prise Cloud Data Management,
Informatica helps our customers
intelligently lead—in any sector,
category or niche. We provide the
foresight to become more agile,
realize new growth opportunities
and create new inventions. With
100% focus on everything data,
Informatica offers the versatility
needed to succeed.
Informatica provides broad sup-
port for Oracle on-premises data-
stores and applications, Oracle
Cloud Big Data and database ser-
vices, and Oracle Cloud applica-
tions such as Eloqua and Netsuite.
Informatica is a Gold level member
of the Oracle PartnerNetwork due to
this long-term strategic relationship.
Q: What changes are you seeing
in the data integration market?
A: The market is going through a
period of massive disruption across
industries. We see many of our cus-
Amit Walia, Chief Product Oficer,
Informatica
tomers—like GE and Amazon for
example—driving that disruption in
their industries to become market
leaders. Digital transformation
implies new business models, new
processes, new ways of engaging
with customers, and new tech-
nology. Every customer has a dif-
ferent deinition, but they all agree
that the critical foundation for digital
transformation is data.
Companies must have the right
data and a comprehensive data
foundation to be successful with
this transformation. They must be
ready to manage the data they
SPONSORED CONTENT
already have, and be ready for the huge
market disruption in data that is coming. We
call it a ‘generational market disruption’ in
data. You must build a data foundation that
can support both your current data needs,
along with this generational market disrup-
tion in data.
“We believe that every company can take advantage
of the disruptive power of data. Our mission as a
company is to help our clients do that by accelerat-
ing their data-driven digital transformation.”
Q: What trends are driving generational
market disruption?
A: Five key trends are converging to deine
our expectations for data by 2020 and
beyond. The irst trend is the explosion
in data volume. We already see this with
over 27 percent annual growth in data per
year. Most companies aren’t prepared for
this rapid growth and need new ways of
managing data to keep up with the data
volume. The second trend has a huge shift
in employees within organizations moving
from being data consumers of reports and
analytic output to becoming data users. This
is continuing to grow rapidly.
The third trend is data types. New types
of data come from mobile devices, social
—Amit Walia, Chief Product Officer, Informatica
platforms, and the Internet of Things (IoT) via
real-time streaming. This data is being cor-
related with more traditional data types, and
then structured to gain value from that data.
This trend is growing so rapidly that we esti-
mate there will be over 20 billion connected
devices by 2020. The fourth trend is in the
area of artiicial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML). Through our new CLAIRE™
engine, we’re providing a knowledge graph
of all enterprise data assets, which can be
applied to practical applications across
industries.
The last—and probably the biggest—
trend is data in the cloud. Today, most data
remains on-premises. But industry projec-
tions estimate over 90 percent of data will
be managed as cloud-based workloads by
2020.
Q: How has Informatica navigated the
change in data management for its
clients?
A: When we talk about Data 1.0, we mean
the mainframe to the client server days,
which covers about 30 years. Data was
captive to speciic applications. If you had a
payroll application or an airline reservation
system, for example, data was captive to
that application. In the past 15 to 20 years,
with Data 2.0, that same data was being
used to support enterprise-wide business
processes. Informatica PowerCenter was
OEM’d by many of the large application
companies to provide data management
solutions to their customers. The next fron-
tier is Data 3.0, where data is the foundation
that powers an organization’s digital trans-
formation efforts.
In the world of Data 1.0, Informatica was
SPONSORED CONTENT

the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) com- this together into a modular platform, built on great example of how an enterprise can
pany. We continue to invest in and lead a microservices architecture, that we call the apply data to fuel their digital transformation
that market for ETL and data integration. Intelligent Data Platform.
In Data 2.0, we broadened our portfolio to We refer to our market opportunity as Q: Tell us how else Informatica supports
include things like data quality, master data Enterprise Cloud Data Management, which their customers’ digital transformation
management, archiving, data security, and encompasses these distinct data manage- journey?
so on. Our portfolio supported data as an ment categories. We ensure it works across A: Our philosophy has always been to be
enterprise-wide process. Now, in Data 3.0, your traditional on-premises environment, best of breed in every category that we
we are a leader in Enterprise Cloud Data your big-data environment on premises or in compete in. If you look at the Gartner Magic
Management, providing our customers with the cloud, your cloud ecosystems, and your Quadrants, we’re a leader in data quality
the ability to manage their data consistently real-time and streaming environments that tools1, master data management solutions2,
whether it is within your enterprise or across deploy for your IoT applications. Recently, data integration tools3, metadata manage-
the variety of cloud ecosystems they’re we’ve begun offering most of our portfolio ment solutions4, and Enterprise Integration
increasingly reliant upon. running natively on Oracle Cloud and other Platform as a Service (Enterprise iPaaS)5.
cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and This is the magic quadrant that focuses on
Q: How is Informatica leading this data- Salesforce. cloud and hybrid data integration and man-
driven disruption for its clients? agement. Informatica is a leader in Enterprise
A: We believe that every company can take Q: Can you share an example of a cus- iPaaS in market share in this quadrant for the
advantage of the disruptive power of data. tomer adapting to data disruption? third year in a row. Informatica made early
Our mission as a company is to help our cli- A: Coca-Cola North America (NA) has been investments in the cloud and we continue to
ents do that by accelerating their data-driven a long-standing customer of Informatica. invest aggressively as we’ve always invested
digital transformation. To do that, we focus Right now, they are working with Informatica in on-premises solutions. We are focused on
on six product categories: data integration, to master data—customer data, reseller our ability to be the Enterprise Cloud Data
data quality, master data management, data data, product data—to support the digital Management company of choice for our
security, big data, cloud data management, transformation of their supply chain. They customers. Together, we help each customer
and our suite of tools that runs natively on are leveraging Informatica tools to achieve achieve great data-driven digital transforma-
Hadoop, Spark, and so on. We bring all of these key objectives. Coca-Cola NA is a tion outcomes.
1
Gartner, 2016 Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools, Saul Judah, Mei Yang Selvage, Ankush Jain, 23 November 2016.
2
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions, Bill O’Kane, Terilyn Palanca, Michael Patrick Moran, 19 January 2017.
3
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, Mark A. Beyer, Eric Thoo, Mei Yang Selvage, Ehtisham Zaidi, 3 August 2017.
4
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions, Guido De Simoni, Roxane Edjlali, 10 August 2017.
5
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, Massimo Pezzini, et al., 30 March 2017.
DIGITAL REVOLUTION

FUTURE
INSIDE ORACLE

INVESTMENTS
India’s commitment to cloud,
startups, and smart cities on
the agenda at Oracle
OpenWorld in New Delhi
By Alison Weiss

17 PHOTOGR APH: ROBERT BIRNBACH

DIGITAL REVOLUTION
INSIDE ORACLE
India is one of the fastest-
growing economies in the
world, and thanks to a new
digital revolution supported
by the government, ambi-
tious technology-driven proj-
18 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
ects are emerging across
the country to accelerate the
development of smart cities
and drive economic growth.
Oracle OpenWorld India 2017
demonstrated how Oracle,
governments, and busi-
nesses of all sizes are working
together to develop India’s
new digital economy.
Oracle, which has about
38,000 employees in India, is
Oracle OpenWorld India drew
more than 12,000 attendees,
with 64 demos and 53 customer
speakers.
PHOTOGR APH: ADAM HOLT/SILVERHUB
DIGITAL REVOLUTION

India’s rapid transformation echoes

the generational shift taking place in
the technology industry. Just as cloud
is triggering broad innovation within
the technology industry, it will also
INSIDE ORACLE

drive changes and increase efficiency

within emerging economies like India.
—ORACLE CEO SAFRA CATZ

expanding its presence in the within the technology indus-

country. At the show, Oracle
CEO Safra Catz shared a
vision for how Oracle’s cloud
technology and other innova-
tions can help enable Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s
Digital India initiative.
“India’s rapid transfor-
mation echoes the genera-
tional shift taking place in the
technology industry,” said
Catz in her May 9 keynote
address. “Just as cloud is
triggering broad innovation
try, it will also drive changes
and increase efficiency
within emerging economies
like India.”
During the show, Oracle
announced the availability
in India of Oracle Enterprise
Resource Planning Cloud
(Oracle ERP Cloud), with new
capabilities to support com-
pliance with India’s recently
enacted Goods and Services
Tax (GST), which replaces
several hundred tax rates

19 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APHS: ABHISHEK BALI/SILVERHUB

DIGITAL REVOLUTION
INSIDE ORACLE
with a simplified, five-tier sys-
tem. These built-in features
clearly demonstrate Oracle’s
commitment to offer cloud
solutions tailored to meet
the specific technology and
infrastructure requirements of
local markets.
According to Ajay Kumar,
solution director for ERP,
20 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
Oracle India, the introduction
of the GST provides an excel-
lent opportunity for organi-
zations to adopt Oracle ERP
Cloud because the solution
automates the management
of tax calculations, liability
accounting, recovery, settle-
ment, and reporting. “Every
business in India now has to
start paying taxes using an
automated or digital solu-
tion,” Kumar says. “And
they all have to revamp their
back-office technology to
meet GST requirements.”
While updating crucial
business systems is top of
mind for companies across
India, government entities,
Attendees gather to learn about
new technologies.
Oracle, and the business
community understand that
investing in the future of
Digital India and furthering
economic growth and devel-
opment also mean encour-
aging the country’s thriv-
ing entrepreneurial culture.
The Oracle Startup Cloud
Accelerator program was
launched in 2016 to guide
and support selected startup
companies by providing them
with coworking facilities,
access to cloud technology,
mentoring from Oracle tech-
nical experts, and introduc-
tions to venture capitalists.
A half-dozen Indian start-
ups, all of which have suc-
cessfully participated in
the Oracle Startup Cloud
Accelerator program, took
part in Oracle OpenWorld
India. They included ezeDox,
PHOTOGR APH: SUNNY L AMBA /SILVERHUB
 which is developing a digital
DIGITAL REVOLUTION
locker for storing and sharing
digitally signed documents,
and Farebond, a data science
and predictive analytics firm.
Sanket Atal, group vice
president of product develop-
ment for Oracle India, notes
that response at the show
was tremendous, particularly
INSIDE ORACLE
in helping startups connect
with potential new customers.
“We wanted to give start-
ups exposure, and over the
two days every startup that
was there came back with
100-plus leads,” Atal says.
“People were very excited
about the program.”
However, startups are not
the only new things being
launched to enable India’s
digital future. Another driv-
ing force in India’s transfor-
mation is the modernization
of municipal services and
infrastructure—including
transportation, water and
waste management, and
smart grids—to support bur-
geoning metropolitan areas
as more people migrate
21 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
from villages and rural areas.
India’s Smart Cities program,
launched in June 2015, seeks
to transform 100 Indian cities
into modern metropolises,
with a goal of improving the
quality of life for millions of
people through technology-
enabled innovations and
simple conveniences such
as bike paths and better
street lighting.
“Smart Cities is an import-
ant part of the larger Digital
India initiative,” says Niraj
Prakash, director of digital
innovation and Digital India
solution consulting at Oracle.
“Its goal is to ensure that all
citizens become connected
with information and services
for all.”
Shailender Kumar, vice
president and regional man-
aging director of Oracle India,
notes that government initia-
tives such as Digital India and
Smart Cities are transforming
governance and accelerating
socioeconomic development.
“Through optimum use of
reliable networks, widespread
Oracle Headlines from
ORACLE OPENWORLD
INDIA
Oracle will expand its
cloud services in India by
opening an Oracle data
center in the next 12 months
Oracle announces
that its Oracle
Enterprise Resource
Planning Cloud delivers
built-in features to facilitate
compliance with India’s
transformational Goods and
Services Tax
connectivity, and intelligent
technologies, including dig-
ital disruptors like the cloud,
the country is geared towards
becoming a digitally empow-
ered nation,” says Kumar.
At Oracle OpenWorld India
and at a nearby conference
Oracle extends its
successful Oracle
Startup Cloud Accelerator
program in India to Mumbai
and New Delhi
Oracle’s innovative
smart city control
center, currently under
development, will help
enable smart cities by pro-
viding a real-time view of
municipal operations
Oracle announces
that Oracle Cloud
Platform has been validated
to develop applications
using India Stack services
and exhibition called One
Mega Event, Oracle showed
its growing portfolio of smart
city technologies in areas
such as public safety, park-
ing, street lighting, and civic
project management. Oracle
demonstrated a smart city
 control center, still in devel-
DIGITAL REVOLUTION
opment, that is designed to
provide a real-time view of
municipal operations using
Oracle Internet of Things
Cloud Service and other
Oracle Cloud services.
“We had thousands of
individuals from different cit-
ies and organizations looking
INSIDE ORACLE
at Oracle’s solutions,” says
Prakash. “Oracle actually
has a long legacy of provid-
ing technology and working
with partners to make cities
smarter in Australia, Canada,
the US, and Dubai. We can
leverage that experience
to help make Smart Cities
a reality.” “In our last 25-plus
years in India, Oracle has
emerged as the trusted part-
ner for both government and
enterprises,” adds Shailender
Kumar. “The adoption of
technologies such as cloud
platforms and applications
has contributed significantly
to our digital momentum.”
Alison Weiss is a frequent
contributor to Profit.
22 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
SANKET ATAL
Group Vice President of
Product Development,
Oracle India
The Oracle Startup Cloud
Accelerator program has
helped launch startups
in India’s vibrant startup
ecosystem in Bangalore
and now in Mumbai and
New Delhi—as well as in
other international loca-
tions. Here Sanket Atal,
group vice president of
product development for
Oracle India, highlights
what makes the program
such a success.
PROFIT: What sets this pro-
gram apart from traditional
incubator programs?
ATAL: Most are run by mar-
keting or sales organiza-
tions, but we run ours out
of R&D. Oracle is a very
tech-oriented company,
an engineer’s paradise.
That’s the kind of environ-
ment we want to provide
to startup companies. We
don’t take any equity, but
we do provide coworking
space and a set of men-
tors who understand each
startup intimately and their
scalability issues.
PROFIT: What are some
of the most valuable
insights participating
startups receive?
ATAL: It’s a big revelation
for them to learn about
the quality cloud services
that Oracle provides. Many
associate Oracle products
only with large enterprises,
but the cloud has really
equalized things. Once
startups start using Oracle
products in the cloud and
start experimenting, they
are blown away. In addition,
association with the Oracle
brand helps tremendously.
It opens doors for them.
PROFIT: Is interest in the pro-
gram continuing to grow?
ATAL: The response has
been tremendous—way
beyond what we thought
we would get. Looking at
it globally, the number of
applications has gotten
absolutely overwhelming.
It underscores the fact
that the word is spread-
ing rapidly and that peo-
ple are very eager to join
the Oracle Startup Cloud
Accelerator program.
PHOTOGR APH: NAMAS BHOJANI
 l d 5
or 281
n W # Vertex and Oracle —
p e th
O oo Partners in Global
c le t B
r a a Tax Solutions
O 2- 4
t
a r The only fully integrated end-to-end
u s b e
t to tax management solution provider to
i
s Oc
V i date with available best practice tax
o m content, tax calculation, and tax
fr reporting solutions for mid-market
and enterprise level customers —
hosted or on-premise.
• Over 20 years of Oracle integration experience
• More than 1,000 mutual clients
• Trusted partner for Oracle ERP and
Oracle ERP Cloud Solutions
• Oracle Validated Integration for
transaction and payroll taxes
• Seamless integration with Oracle
E-Business Suite R12 and JDE

Click here to learn more about our Vertex Cloud Solution

START YOUR ENGINES
Let entrepreneurs follow their passions
and build successful businesses where
freedom can flourish.
Everyone knows that behind
every successful startup or
small business is a leader who
rolls the entrepreneurial dice
PERSPECTIVE
for that huge payday in the
future, right? Not necessarily.
“Almost all of the entrepre-
neurs I’ve met want freedom,
and that’s why they’re working
PASSION hard,” Nikolaj Astrup said in a
recent blog post.
He should know. Over the
DISCIPLINE past five years, Astrup’s com-
pany, Refuga, has led hun-
FREEDOM
dreds of entrepreneurs on
treks to the Himalayas, Mount
Kilimanjaro, Morocco, Tanzania,
and other exotic locales. It’s
an extreme form of business
STEVE COX, Group Vice President, Oracle ERP and EPM networking that’s given Astrup
Product Marketing
a unique opportunity to hear
what drives entrepreneurs.
24 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
And he’s learned that the
financial rewards don’t even
rank among the top six busi-
ness incentives for these
intrepid executives.
As someone who has
worked with and around entre-
preneurs and small-to-medium
businesses (SMBs) for more
than 20 years, this doesn’t
surprise me. In fact, I’ve come
to believe that freedom isn’t
just a lure for those in corner
offices—it’s also a prime moti-
vator for the vast majority of
people who choose to work at
SMBs in any capacity.
But I’d add one important
detail: it takes more than a
desire to work without limits
to build a successful company.
SMB owners must balance the
PHOTOGR APH: JOHN BLY THE
 urge for professional freedom
START YOUR ENGINES

with the discipline to create

and trust a formal organi-
zational structure with stan-
I’ve come to believe that freedom isn’t just a lure for
dardized business processes those in corner offices—it’s also a prime motivator for
and governance policies that
protect sensitive data and
the vast majority of people who choose to work at SMBs
intellectual property. That’s a in any capacity.
tricky balancing act that takes
insightful leadership and wise
PERSPECTIVE

choices about what tools can

best support standardiza-
tion and necessary controls.
Otherwise, discipline spawns
a culture of rigidity that stifles
the sense of independence
and the emotional investment
that draws talented people to
fast-growing companies.
Success comes when
business leaders achieve
something akin to freedom
in their business processes
and the applications that
support them. Look for three
characteristics when making
IT choices.
First, applications must be
able to be quickly tailored
and updated to meet evolv-
ing business requirements.
If you are working to carve
out a place for yourself in
a fast-moving market, your
business systems can’t limit
your agility and creativity.
They must support the cul-
ture that brought everyone
together, to the benefit of the
business, in the first place.
Second, applications must
easily scale to support peri-
ods of fast growth and staff
expansions. If success is in
your future, so is increasing
complexity. Overworked
entrepreneurs, founders, and
SMB leaders are often under
pressure to deliver results in
the immediate short term. So,
trusting that your systems can
scale as you grow allows you
to focus on what’s important,
even as new markets and cus-
tomers await your arrival.
Third, solutions must pro-
mote business processes that
reflect industry best practices
rather than saddle compa-
nies with rigid, proprietary
ways of working. This is the
classic “don’t reinvent the
wheel” mentality that I often
see with successful entrepre-
neurs—they don’t waste their
time and resources on pro-
cesses that don’t add value.
Learn from the work of others
who have come before and
implement proven processes
that won’t slow you down in
the future.
This strategic combina-
tion will help ensure that
when new business oppor-
tunities arise, SMB leaders
have the freedom to put their
foot on the growth acceler-
ator and move faster than
their competitors.
FREE TO INNOVATE
Achieving the freedom/
discipline balance isn’t easy,
and in the past, it was a chal-
lenge that caused many start-
ups to stumble. But that’s
changing, thanks to a conver-
gence of digital innovations,
starting with cloud comput-
ing. The best services reduce
IT complexity so in-house
staffs can focus their talents
on strategic business initia-
tives. Top cloud applications

25 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

START YOUR ENGINES

We’re at a new technological inflection point—on par

with the first PCs and the rise of the internet—that will
continue to raise the stature of SMBs as the primary
engines of business growth and innovation.
PERSPECTIVE

also offer modern capabil-
ities and flexible interfaces
that make it easy for end
users to be productive. More
importantly, they give busi-
ness leaders the freedom to
innovate, thanks to a steady
cadence of new features
and updates.
All of this helps explain
why SMBs are embracing
the cloud: more than 70 per-
cent of US companies with
100 or fewer employees
have adopted cloud services,
according to IDC. Midsize
firms—those with 100 to
1,000 employees—are even
more enthusiastic: 90 percent
of them now take advantage
of the cloud.
But cloud computing is just
the start. Today’s digital con-
vergence also includes mobile
applications, sophisticated
but easy-to-use big data ana-
lytics, the Internet of Things,
artificial intelligence, machine
learning, geolocation soft-
ware, and augmented reality.
These new tools let structured
freedom thrive within SMBs
and, in turn, they make it eas-
ier for leaders to launch new
business initiatives and grow
to become market leaders.
We’re at a new technolog-
ical inflection point—on par
with the first PCs and the rise
of the internet—that will con-
tinue to raise the stature of
SMBs as the primary engines
of business growth and inno-
vation. And best of all, it will
let entrepreneurs follow their
passions and build successful
businesses where freedom
can flourish.
Steve Cox leads go-to-market
strategy for Oracle ERP Cloud
and Oracle EPM Cloud. He
is the author of Modern Best
Practice Explained, an ebook
articulating processes needed
by organizations embarking on
digital transformation.
ACTION ITEM
The Talent and Technology
that's Driving America’s Fastest
Growing Companies

26 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 The Integrated Supply Chain Specialists
PLM, SCM, Logistics + Core ERP & Financials

Helping companies like Nahdi and Coca-Cola Bottlers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd. transform their supply chains

Nahdi selected Inspirage to help enhance

distribution planning using OTM Cloud
Malaysia
utilization, significant cost
RESULTS: Increased carrier
Inspirage was selected by Coca-Cola
savings through process Bottlers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd. to

and drive warehouse efficiencies with

optimization and end-to-end streamline transportation processes
shipment tracking
OTM Cloud

RESULTS: Improved control,

security and labor utilization,
increased frequency of real-time
shipment status updates and
streamlined freight auditing and
settlement processes

Inspirage has long been a proponent of the advantages of building a fully integrated supply chain. Now, with Release 13
of Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management and ERP solutions, Oracle offers a fully integrated platform on which to
build out that vision. Inspirage can help you make that happen, in as little as 90 days.
 Dr. Khalid
Tadlaoui, vice
president of
IT at Nahdi,
emphasizes the
Cloud services help create a importance of
healthy blend of digital and bricks- an omnichannel
solution to meet
and-mortar operations for Saudi the needs of
online shoppers.
Arabia’s leading pharmacy.

HOLISTIC
REMEDY
BY ALAN JOCH
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ABDULRAHMAN BAYASHOUT/
THE VERBATIM AGENCY

Nahdi Medical Co. became the Kingdom of Saudi

Arabia’s leading retail pharmacy chain with a simple but
potent business model: it made shopping for prescrip-
tions and personal-care products convenient. 90 percent
of the Saudi population lives within a short walk of one of
Nahdi’s huge extended network of stores, and by staff-
ing those stores with experienced pharmacists and other
employees, the company ensures an optimal customer

28 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 experience. But recently, dark
clouds of business disruption have
swirled around market leaders
across all industries, and in 2015
Nahdi’s managers realized their
successful business model ran
the risk of being upended unless
they acted quickly. So in 2016,
they launched a transformation
strategy that addressed a chief
vulnerability—Nahdi’s minimal
ecommerce presence.
“More and more customers,
especially younger ones, are
buying online, so we decided to
invest heavily in this area,” says Dr.
Employees: Oracle Retail DR. KHALID
Khalid Tadlaoui, vice president of Dr. Tadlaoui 10,000 Order Broker, TADLAOUI
information technology at Nahdi. and his team Oracle CX, Oracle
Oracle products: Vice President
It turns out that Nahdi’s lead- are now Oracle
Retail Xstore of Information
ers put their ecommerce plan in seeing the SNAPSHOT Transportation
Point of Service, Technology
benefits of both Oracle E-Business
motion just in time. In the spring NAHDI MEDICAL Management Length of tenure:
cloud-based Suite, Oracle’s
of 2016, in a move that opened up CO. Cloud Service, Eight years
transportation Siebel Customer
nahdi.sa Oracle Retail
a new front in the battle for retail management Relationship Education:
Advanced Science
customers in the Middle East, and a new Headquarters: Management Engineering degree
Cloud Service,
Jeddah, Kingdom software, Oracle and PhD in com-
online giant Amazon announced suite of retail the Oracle Retail
of Saudi Arabia RightNow Service puter science,
its acquisition of souq.com, a applications. Merchandising
Industry: Experience Institut National
large ecommerce marketplace software suite,
Retail pharma- Platform, Oracle des Sciences
Oracle Retail
serving the region. The move ceuticals and SOA Suite, Oracle Appliquées in
Category
introduced new competitive personal-care Hyperion Planning Toulouse, France
Management
pressures that could dramatically products Planning and
change the market. Optimization,

29 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 Tadlaoui expects Nahdi to pre-
vail because the transformation
plan that’s been rolling out since
2016 isn’t simply a defensive move
against online competitors. “We
wanted an omnichannel solution
that leveraged all of our exist-
ing assets, and the biggest one
we have today is our network of
stores and the people who oper-
ate them,” Tadlaoui says.
The Nahdi staff is working with
Oracle to merge the company’s
digital and physical worlds using
cloud services that manage a
wide range of retail and transpor-
tation management activities. This
approach addresses a problem
that has confounded other bricks-
30 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
and-mortar retailers trying to tran-
Nahdi executives sition to ecommerce. In their rush
are helming an
to act, established retailers often
effort to combine
their network of launch online operations as an
physical stores island apart from their traditional
with the right businesses—with separate sys-
online strategy. tems running shipping and inven-
tory management, outbound mar-
keting, customer service, and data
sharing. This approach makes
a well-integrated omnichannel
company more of a dream than
a reality.
Nahdi executives believe that
by combining their network of
physical stores with the right
online strategy, they can avoid
the omnichannel problems seen
by others. Even Amazon’s execu-
90
Percentage of the Saudi
population that lives within a
short walk of one of Nahdi’s
huge extended network of
stores, which includes 1,000
different locations across the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
tives seem to agree. The company
opened a retail bookstore in New
York City last spring, and this sum-
mer paid an estimated US$13.7
billion for the Whole Foods gro-
cery chain and its roughly 430
physical stores throughout the
US. A new lesson appears to be
PHOTOGR APHS: COURTESY OF NAHDI
 emerging in the industry: consum-
ers aren’t choosing online versus
bricks and mortar. They want both
options, so they can choose the
one that’s most convenient at any
given moment.
With the omnichannel foun-
dation now in place, and a clear
roadmap for expanding it through
2018, Nahdi is solidifying its lead-
ership in a market that’s being
rocked by outside forces.
A SHAKE-UP IN RETAIL
Maintaining economic viability
isn’t an idle concern for market
leaders. New players with bet-
ter business models and innova-
tive products regularly overtake
once-dominant companies. This
reality is driven home by a recent
American Enterprise Institute
analysis that determined nearly
half the firms in the Standard &
Poor’s 500 could be replaced
in the next 10 years because of
“creative destruction.”
The rise of online shopping is
bringing disruption to the entire
retail industry. For more than three
years, revenue gains in that sector
31 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
UP-TO-THE-MINUTE INVENTORY ACCURACY
Now that Oracle
Transportation Management
Cloud Service is fully
implemented, the staff at
Nahdi Medical is extend-
ing its capabilities—not
with costly customizations,
but by connecting it to
an internally developed
mobile application.
Designed by Oracle part-
ner Inspirage to run on
commercial-grade hand-
held devices, the app—
called Tasheel (which means
simplifying in Arabic)—lets
drivers confirm shipping
units loaded as they accept
inventory at distribution
centers. When products
are delivered, pharmacists
enter receipt confirmations
into the mobile software,
which also logs any boxes
being returned for damage
or because they’re past
expiration dates. The app
even tracks any empty ship-
ping containers the driver
is bringing back to the
warehouse for reuse. The
mobile app regularly sends
delivery updates to Oracle
Transportation Management
Cloud Service. And if a
delivery is moving through
a part of the country where
mobile connectivity is
limited, the app features
“store and forward” capa-
bilities that ensure updates
are made in the system
as soon as cellular service
is restored.
Maintaining accurate
proof of delivery is a par-
ticularly important payoff.
In the past, pharmacists
weren’t required to immedi-
ately acknowledge receipt
of shipments, which led to
time gaps in the chain of
custody for controlled sub-
stances. This old system
also resulted in missing or
incomplete information from
stores, leaving an average
of about 15 percent of stock
unaccounted for during
long periods. “We would
reconcile receipts when we
did cycle counts with stores
every six months or some-
times annually depending
on store profile,” says Sayed
Al-Sayed, Nahdi’s supply
chain applications manager.
“But that was a huge discon-
nect representing millions
of dollars.”
Now, Nahdi obtains proof
of delivery as inventory is
being moved off trucks and
into stores. “Maintaining
accurate inventory records
requires attention to detail
at every step in the sup-
ply chain,” Al-Sayed says.
“We’re now able to do that
on all fronts—from ordering
and distribution to shipment
planning and deliveries.”

Aiman Ali Al-Saggaf, Retail
Applications Manager, Nahdi
have come primarily from online
channels, according to a report by
the management consulting firm
PwC. The sales gap was especially
stark in 2016, when online sales
rose more than 10 percent, while
in-store sales grew less than 2 per-
cent, the report says.
But retailers that have invested
32 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
Consumers get a
complete view of what’s
available in our physical
and ecommerce stores.
They can use their
smartphones, tablets, or
desktop computers to see
heavily in physical stores are still
struggling with this new reality.
this information anywhere
PwC analysts found that many
omnichannel strategies are costly and anytime.
because they require stores to —Aiman Ali Al-Saggaf, Retail Applications
maintain multiple supply chains
Manager, Nahdi
and inventory pools.
Nahdi’s executives found suc-
cess with a different formula: using
a range of Oracle cloud applica-
tions, they’re creating back-end
operations that blend the online
and physical worlds to better

Pharmacists in our stores
are better able to plan
for the next scheduled
delivery. . . . That results in
enhanced experiences for
our customers.
—Sayed Al-Sayed, Supply Chain
Applications Manager, Nahdi
33 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
serve customers and capitalize
on the efficiencies of a central
distribution system.
To support customer-facing
operations, Nahdi is building busi-
ness processes with Oracle Retail
Advanced Science Cloud Service,
the Oracle Retail Merchandising
software suite, Oracle Retail
Category Management Planning
and Optimization, Oracle Retail
Order Broker, Oracle Customer
Experience (Oracle CX), and
Oracle Retail Xstore Point of
Service at the IT core. Together
these applications give the Nahdi
staff accurate views of current
inventory levels in stores and dis-
tribution centers and determine
the best fulfillment options for
each transaction. The cloud envi-
ronment also provides business
processes designed for a consis-
tent customer experience across
sales channels.
The company is already seeing
Sayed Al-Sayed, Supply Chain
Applications Manager, Nahdi
early rewards from this assembly
of cloud services. For example,
customers can go online to see
accurate inventory levels in each
store. If an item isn’t available
locally, shoppers will see the near-
est alternative location, or they
may choose to order online and
pick up the product at a store of
their choice. “Consumers get a
complete view of what’s available
in our physical and ecommerce
stores,” says Aiman Ali Al-Saggaf,
retail applications manager at
Nahdi. “They can use their smart-
phones, tablets, or desktop com-
puters to see this information any-
where and anytime.”
To further achieve the omni-
channel goal, the company is now
launching new customer engage-
ment services that will enable
Nahdi’s marketing staff to seg-
ment customer demographic data
and information gathered from
point-of-sale systems and loyalty
programs. With the help of predic-
tive analytics from Oracle, market-
ers can then craft communications
and promotions that will resonate
with individual shoppers.
 We wanted an omnichannel solution that leveraged all of our
existing assets, and the biggest one we have today is our network
of stores and the people who operate them.
—Dr. Khalid Tadlaoui, Vice President of Information Technology, Nahdi

This consolidated information
for physical stores and online pur-
chasing wasn’t available to cus-
tomers in the past. In addition,
the in-depth product information
gives consumers the option to
comparison shop and read prod-
uct reviews, Tadlaoui adds.
TRANSPORTATION
MANAGEMENT’S VITAL ROLE
It’s not enough for customers to
shop online; they also need to
receive their purchases as quickly
as possible. For now, Nahdi’s dig-
ital shoppers “click and collect”—
they fill shopping baskets online
and then go to their store of choice
to pick up the completed orders.
But the company’s staff is work-
ing to introduce delivery options.
A pilot project is currently testing
home deliveries in Jeddah, Riyadh,
and Dammam, and Nahdi exec-
utives plan to eventually roll out
home delivery to other large cities
throughout the Kingdom in 2018.
Oracle cloud services have
already helped move products
more nimbly between Nahdi’s
distribution centers and stores,
says Sayed Al-Sayed, supply chain
applications manager at Nahdi.
Until recently, the supply chain
staff relied on spreadsheets to
help get the right products to
the right retail outlets at the right
time. That was difficult because
of Nahdi’s size and available
resources. The company uses mul-
tiple distribution centers and a
mix of dry and refrigerated deliv-
ery trucks to handle more than
10,000 products. Many stores
are restocked weekly, although
high-volume locations in major
cities and those close to holy
mosques near Medina and Mecca
can be replenished daily.
The Kingdom’s physical charac-
teristics add delivery challenges.
The Kingdom spans 1.6 million
square miles and, until recently, all
medicines shipped from a main
distribution center in Jeddah, the
largest port on the Red Sea and
the location of Nahdi’s headquar-

34 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017


ters. A new center in the capital
city of Riyadh has shortened the
trips of some delivery trucks, but
even so, some still travel more
than 300 miles to reach outlying
cities and towns. During the sum-
mer months, drivers battle tem-
peratures that can spike to 122
degrees Fahrenheit.
This combination of factors
makes accurate delivery schedul-
ing and route planning essential.
But in recent years, spreadsheets
35 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
have become an outdated method
Nahdi’s IT leaders for consolidating shipments,
say the company
reducing cycle times, and better
is already seeing
early rewards managing costs. Logistics man-
from its assembly agers also needed more-detailed
of cloud services. information about the status of
deliveries. “Tracking shipments
and knowing where drivers are at
all times was a huge challenge,”
Al-Sayed says.
The Nahdi staff had those
needs in mind when they looked
for a modern alternative to
spreadsheets. Al-Sayed says
Nahdi’s top requirement was an
application that was recognized
as a leader for transportation
management and that already
had a large global customer base.
Nahdi was already using a num-
ber of on-premises and cloud
offerings from Oracle, so any
new application also had to work
well within that environment. He
and his staff also wanted to avoid
time-consuming and hard-to-
maintain customizations, so the
standard services available in the
application had to meet most of
Nahdi’s needs at the outset.
Cloud was another require-
ment. “We conducted an ROI
assessment and concluded that
the best way to address our cost
requirements and adhere to indus-
try best practices was with a cloud
solution,” Al-Sayed says.
Oracle Transportation
Management Cloud Service met
all those requirements, with a clear
additional benefit. Oracle has an
established track record in trans-
portation management and pro-
vided valuable expertise during
 and after the implementation
process. “Whenever we reached
a challenging step, we received
excellent support from the Oracle
team,” Al-Sayed adds.
In the months since Oracle
Transportation Management Cloud
Service went live, Nahdi’s planning
and execution operations have
logged significant improvements.
“We now have greater visibility into
shipment demands and delivery
status, which means we have the
flexibility to quickly redo plans as
new requirements arise,” Al-Sayed
says. “The accuracy of Oracle
Transportation Management Cloud
Service’s recommended plans
and route optimizations enables
us to consolidate shipments more
effectively, which increases truck
utilization rates.”
Prior to implementing Oracle
Transportation Management Cloud
Service, truck utilization hovered
around 85 percent; today it shows
a significant improvement ranging
from 5 to 10 percent, he reports.
To ensure the quality of med-
icines in transit, Al-Sayed’s
team is now integrating Oracle
36 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
5–10
Percentage of Nahdi’s
delivery truck utilization,
up from about 85 percent
since implementing Oracle
Transportation Management
Cloud Service
Transportation Management Cloud
Service with data collected from
sensors installed in trucks. The
sensors relay data about tempera-
tures in shipping compartments,
as well as the geographic locations
and speeds of vehicles. A software
program gathers and analyzes this
sensor information and sounds an
alarm if temperatures or vehicle
speeds surpass thresholds set
by Nahdi.
“By integrating all this data
with Oracle Transportation
Management Cloud Service, we
get a central view of all shipments,
their status, and the prevailing envi-
ronmental factors,” Al-Sayed says.
“Pharmacists in our stores are bet-
ter able to plan for the next sched-
uled delivery, and at the end of the
day, that results in enhanced expe-
riences for our consumers.”
Nahdi’s leaders are now blend-
ing the behind-the-scenes optimi-
zations of cloud-based transpor-
tation management with a new
suite of retail applications and
the larger ecommerce strategy.
“We’re working hard to ensure
shoppers experience high levels of
customer service whether they’re
in our stores or online,” Tadlaoui
says. “Together, our complemen-
tary cloud services are helping us
achieve this full-fledged omnichan-
nel presence.”
Alan Joch is a business and technol-
ogy writer who specializes in enter-
prise applications, cloud computing,
mobile computing, and the web.
ACTION ITEMS
Oracle Transportation Management
Solutions
The Power and ROI of Retail Science
in the Cloud
Empowered Workforce: Oracle Retail
Merchandise Operations Learning
Subscription
SPONSORED CONTENT

KPMG Increases Value to

Customers with Oracle Global
Cloud Elite Partner Status
Top distinction awarded for highest levels of commitment
and superior Oracle Cloud experience
Linsey Ryan, Advisory Principal
By Linsey Ryan, Advisory Principal and Global Oracle Service Network and Global Oracle Service Network
Leader at KPMG Leader, KPMG

KPMG’s strategy to build world-
class technology and delivery
models that enable transformation
across their clients’ businesses
earned them several prominent des-
ignations and awards from Oracle
in 2017. Just one year after being
awarded Cloud Elite Partner status,
KPMG has achieved Global Cloud
Elite Partner status. Oracle awards
this status to partners that bring the
highest levels of commitment and
For more information, skills, and have demonstrated full
contact Linsey Ryan
or visit www.kpmg.com/us/ investment in a depth and breadth
poweredenterprise-oracle of Oracle Cloud experience to pro-
vide comprehensive Oracle Cloud
solutions to joint clients.
It’s been a good year for KPMG in
the Oracle market. Where do you
see particular momentum?
KPMG has seen a signiicant uptake
in clients moving their back ofice
functions such as inance, Human
Resources (HR), and supply chain
to the cloud—all at the same time.
Oracle is a leader in providing a
fully-integrated cloud platform
that encompasses the entire back
ofice. Leveraging our Oracle
Cloud-enabled solutions, clients
are realizing a holistic approach
allows them to embrace best prac-
tices, drive out customization, and
streamline their organizations much
more eficiently. We are fully aligned
with Oracle’s “uniied inance and
HR in the cloud” strategy and our
joint focus has proved successful
this past year.
What is driving demand for your
Oracle Cloud-enabled solutions?
We focus on growing close and
strong relationships with our clients
SPONSORED CONTENT

to fully understand their business, culture, considerations, and opportunities of accomplishment. KPMG was awarded this
and challenges. Our KPMG Powered cloud transformation to deliver results that status based on our major impact on the
Enterprise (KPE) and Securing the ERP matter. KPE helps clients make a real market, proven track record of successful
(SERP) solutions help to enable faster, business transformational change in a cloud deployments, and signiicant invest-
smarter, and more successful deployments faster, more complete and cost-effective ment in Oracle Cloud solutions. The
on the Oracle Cloud platform. This approach way, to achieve greater return on Global Cloud Elite designation recognizes
KPMG’s ongoing commitment to helping
our customers around the world shift to
“KPMG is one of our leading cloud partners with a strong new cloud-based IT models that drive
innovation and agility, and deliver a dis-
track record of successful deployments. They have a unique tinct advantage over competitors.
advantage and offering in the marketplace with KPMG
What does Global Cloud Elite status
Powered Enterprise, and the firm’s transformational capabil- mean to clients?
ities will continue to play a key role in helping organizations The Oracle Global Cloud Elite designation
signals to clients KPMG’s deep level of exper-
innovate, adapt and grow in the cloud with Oracle.” tise, and commitment to and success in the
—Jeff Henley, Executive Vice Chairman, Oracle Oracle arena. It also means we continue
to make investments in Oracle technology
and training. KPMG has attained 25 Oracle
simpliies, accelerates, and secures investment (ROI). SERP provides security specializations including advanced special-
adoption of Oracle Cloud solutions for more and controls to help balance growth and izations for Oracle Financials Cloud, Oracle
successful business outcomes. eficiency with the need to protect sensitive Global Human Resources Cloud, and Oracle
data and transactions. Cloud Planning. As a Global Elite Cloud
Tell us about KPMG’s focus on business Partner, KPMG and our customers beneit
transformation and competitive What were the key factors in achieving from the highest engagement and commit-
advantage afforded by KPMG Powered Global Cloud Elite recognition? ment from Oracle. All of this underscores our
Enterprise and Securing the ERP? To achieve Oracle Global Cloud Elite growing reputation as one of the most trusted
We’ve thought through the questions, Partner in less than a year is a noteworthy advisors for Oracle Cloud solutions.
Some or all of the services described herein may not be permissible for KPMG audit clients and their afiliates.
© 2017 KPMG LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership and the U.S. member irm of the KPMG network
of independent member irms afiliated with KPMG International Cooperative (“KPMG International”), a Swiss entity.
All rights reserved. The KPMG name and logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of KPMG International.
START YOUR ENGINES
As an SMB, knowing your customers
intimately is your differentiator.
The notion of customer
centricity is at the root of
everything a small-to-medium
business (SMB) does. The
business is often built on
PERSPECTIVE
personal relationships—and
that’s the way it’s always
been. Think about the tra-
ditional butcher from the
1950s—he knew his custom-
ers by name and what cuts of
meat they preferred. He also
knew if they had a dog and
PERSONAL would offer them bones to
take home free of charge.
ADVANTAGE
Today, with the advent of
the digital economy, that local
butcher can eventually serve
customers around the world.
But in doing so, he must keep
DAVID GOLTZ, CX Digital Transformation Strategist, in mind his most valuable
Oracle Cloud Applications
asset: an intimate understand-
ing of his customers.
39 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APH: FREDERIC COURBET/ THE VERBATIM AGENCY
As an SMB, knowing your
customers intimately is your
differentiator. It allows you to
personalize your interactions
with each customer, which is
the reason your customers are
so loyal to you.
But how do you stay close
and scale simultaneously? Here
are five strategies to maintain
that deep understanding and
provide a personalized experi-
ence as you grow.
1. Open source. Originally
popularized by the software
development community,
open source referred to the
idea of making a piece of code
available to the general public
for use or modification. Most
people said it wasn’t practi-
cal because ideas would be
stolen; then GitHub became
 the leading development
START YOUR ENGINES
platform. Some other people
thought it would be inter-
esting to make knowledge
itself open source. Most peo-
ple thought that was crazy;
some thought it was funny.
Then Wikipedia became as
accurate as Britannica. How
is open sourcing relevant
PERSPECTIVE
to the SMB? It’s a low-cost
(free) way to get your ideas
improved at a rapid pace by
a group of people who are
passionate about your prod-
ucts. But how do you find
those people?
2. Build a tribe. Sebastian
Junger’s fascinating book
Tribe: On Homecoming
and Belonging (Twelve,
2016) takes a critical look at
post-traumatic stress disor-
der and the many challenges
today’s returning veterans
face in modern society. In his
research, he found out how
at odds the structure of mod-
ern society is with our tribal
instincts, arguing that the
difficulties many veterans face
upon returning home from
40 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
Don’t let your brand sit behind a series of images—
engage, and be authentic.
war do not stem entirely from
the trauma they’ve suffered,
but also from the individualist
societies they must reinte-
grate into.
The same applies to our
society as a whole. With rising
rates of depression, we can
find the fulfillment we seek in
the loyalty, interreliance, and
cooperation that exist in com-
munities. One of the macro
trends we continue to see is
the popularity of customer
communities. As an SMB, you
need to create a tribe among
your customers. A recent
study by VisionCritical found
that 80 percent of community
members indicated that they
feel more loyal to a brand
because of their participation.
If you have a physical space,
invite your community of cus-
tomers and spend time get-
ting to know them. If you’re a
digital brand, be hypervigilant
on social media to create a
fun, safe place for your follow-
ers to interact with you. Don’t
let your brand sit behind a
series of images—engage,
and be authentic.
3. Cocreate. Once you’ve
found your tribe members
and you’re ready to open
source the growth of your
business, be specific about
how they can help you. If
you’re getting ready for a new
product release, don’t expect
to make the product from
scratch—get them involved.
Ask for feedback along the
way and before release, just
as you would from your prod-
uct development team. Even
better, ask them to help with
marketing: “We just created
this thing based on the feed-
back we’ve gotten from our
community. What do you
guys think we should name
it?” This level of intimacy with
customers is where you need
to be. In fact, new research
from Longitude Research,
in conjunction with Hitachi,
revealed that 57 percent of
respondents said that co-
creation has transformed
their company’s approach to
innovation and 61 percent
said it’s creating new com-
mercial opportunities.
4. Sell through service.
Many SMBs these days are
born completely digital.
Growth hacking is in their
DNA. These SMBs work hard
to understand a customer’s
decision-making process at
 every point in the interaction
START YOUR ENGINES

with their digital brand. Most

often, there are no humans
involved. One of the few ways
Personalization positively influences how people feel
that a customer might interact about your business. Plus, it makes them more likely
with another human during
that experience, however, is
to buy from and recommend your brand.
through chat. Whether it’s
answering questions before a
purchase or afterward, service
PERSPECTIVE

agents have the great respon-
sibility of representing the
essence of the brand. Training
is important, but what’s more
important is that they feel
empowered to make judg-
ment calls to do right by the
customer. Typically, conversa-
tions with service agents start
out as educational, which
builds trust and makes their
opinion more valuable to the
customers when they make a
recommendation. Customer
service agents shouldn’t be
salespeople, but they should
be able to transact on behalf
of customers if it’s helpful
to them.
5. Immerse your customers.
Businesses that provide phys-
ical experiences with custom-
ers need to be thinking about
how to immerse their cus-
tomers completely from the
moment they see the store.
In a recent study by Forbes,
60 percent of the chief mar-
keting officers surveyed value
brand experience for creating
ongoing relationships. When
creating those experiences,
be very specific about the
emotions you want your cus-
tomers to experience when
they walk through your door,
and work backward to find
out how to design the phys-
ical space appropriately. Be
as detailed as possible. The
same applies if you’re a purely
digital brand, because your
website is a digital represen-
tation of who you are. Make
sure it tells a story—if you’re
digital, that’s the fastest way
to convey the emotion you’re
looking for. The same applies
if you operate both physi-
cally and digitally. Just make
sure you’re evoking the same
emotions for customers in
both places to reinforce your
personalized brand.
Personalization positively
influences how people feel
about your business. Plus, it
makes them more likely to
buy from and recommend
your brand. A new study
from OneSpot shows that
64 percent of customers are
more likely to recommend a
brand if it does a great job of
delivering personally relevant
content. As an SMB, person-
alization is your foundation.
Using these five strategies
will help you maintain that
foundation as you continue
to grow.
And if mobile apps are
going to play a role in your
personalization strategy, be
sure to keep these three
must-haves for mobile apps
in mind.
David Goltz is a principal sales
consultant at Oracle.
ACTION ITEMS
5 Actions You Can Take Right
Now to Help Your SMB Grow
The Business of GO: Oracle
SMB Blog
Oracle SMB Solutions

41 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

SPONSORED CONTENT

A Modern FinTech
Payments Organization
Western Union uses BlackLine and Oracle solutions
to reduce risk, improve efficiency, and increase visibility.

For more information, visit
www.blackline.com/proit
W
estern Union has a rich
history encompassing
more than 165 years of
innovation and has successfully
diversiied and transformed its busi-
ness model to a global FinTech pay-
ments company. Today, the com-
pany is rapidly growing its online
presence with transactional website
and mobile apps in 37 countries, as
well as business-to-business and
retail money-transfer capabilities
across more than 500,000 world-
wide agent locations, over 100,000
ATMs and kiosks, and via connec-
tions to hundreds of millions of bank
accounts and mobile wallets. To
help millions of people worldwide
transfer money, Western Union
uses Oracle E-Business Suite along
with Oracle Hyperion Financial
Management.
The company was looking to
reduce manual steps and time in its
reconciliation process. According
to Shay Carroll, accounting director
GSAS at Western Union, “We were
looking to enhance and improve our
worklows. For remote Accounting
groups and peer reviews we had
hard-copy reconciliations and
respective backups that had to be
scanned and sent as an email—and
then signed and sent back. This
was incredibly time-consuming.
There was very little automation.”
Why BlackLine?
To help improve and automate
accounting processes, Western
Union chose BlackLine among a list
of best-in-class vendors. Western
SPONSORED CONTENT
Union rolled out BlackLine’s Finance Controls
and Automation Platform over a period of four
months. The platform complements Oracle’s
capabilities by automating manual period-end
accounting processes and also enables cus-
tomers to move beyond these outdated pro-
cesses to a “continuous accounting” model.
“BlackLine has given us a greater level of efficiency
in terms of workflow.”
—Shay Carroll, Accounting Director GSAS, Western Union
With continuous accounting, real-time auto-
mation, controls, and period-end tasks are
embedded within day-to-day activities.
“We were impressed by how well it went,”
says Carroll. “Four months in, we turned
off the old system because our users were
already performing 100 percent of their rec-
onciliations in BlackLine.”
The Results
The results of the implementation were
impressive:
Improved worklow eficiency and
employee productivity by eliminating
manual processes. With BlackLine’s
Account Reconciliations, Western Union
brought all monthly reconciliations online,
eliminating the need for duplicate data
entry, printing, and back-and forth emails.
According to Carroll, “BlackLine has given
us a greater level of eficiency in terms
of worklow. It replaced all our manual
processes. We have everything in a one-
stop shop. All reports are produced out
of BlackLine, and we have signiicantly
reduced our printing needs.”
Increased compliance and eficiencies
were achieved by having real-time visi-
bility into reconciliation status and results
throughout the process, allowing managers
to focus resources more effectively.
Enabled access to all records, from
anywhere in the world, at any time. By
eliminating paper and spreadsheet-driven
processes, Carroll and his team have not
only reduced spending but also improved
worklow through real-time access to critical
data. According to one user, “Team assign-
ments are magic. There’s no panic when
someone is out of the ofice.”
Gained the ability to reconcile in mul-
tiple currencies, not just US dollars. As
a global business, Western Union has over
25 currency ledgers in Oracle, yet previously
all ledgers were reconciled in US dollars.
“Users were also challenged because they
weren’t reconciling in local currency,” says
Carroll. “With BlackLine, for the irst time,
we have multicurrency reconciliations.”
Soma Bay’s stunning
luxury resort on the
Egyptian coast of the Red
Sea attracts visitors who
enjoy golf and a variety
of water sports—to name
just a few.

DESTINATION:
CLOUD Soma Bay gets lofty results by moving its JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne system to Oracle Cloud IaaS.
BY DAVID BAUM | PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID DEGNER/THE VERBATIM AGENCY
PHOTOGR APH: COURTESY OF SOMA BAY
 Management, Job MOHAMMED
Cost, Real Estate SERRY
Management, CFO, Soma Bay
Homebuilder Company
Soma Bay Company SNAPSHOT Management,
CFO Mohammed Serry Capital Asset Length of tenure:
SOMA BAY Five years
credits JD Edwards DEVELOPMENT Maintenance,
EnterpriseOne COMPANY Service Education:
solutions as a key somabay.com Management, and CPA, Colorado
factor in executing Time and Labor State Board of
Location: modules; Oracle
“a very aggressive Accountancy
Hurghada, Egypt SaaS applica-
turnaround plan” over Personal quote/
the last four years. Industry: tions, including
Oracle Customer mantra:
Real estate and
“Creativity is
hotel development Experience Cloud,
Oracle Hospitality just connecting

S
tart with an unspoiled coastal enjoy golf, scuba diving, snorkel- Employees: Suite, Oracle things. When
More than 2,000 you ask creative
peninsula, ringed by a coral ing, or just relaxing by one of its Human Capital
Revenue: Management, people how they
reef and cooled by an azure many swimming pools. A steady did something,
More than and Oracle
sea. Add a championship golf offshore wind makes for excellent they feel a little
E£700 million Procurement
course, five hotels, a world-class wind surfing and kite surfing. With guilty because
spa, and luxury vacation homes. the added draw of limousine ser- Oracle products: Cloud; Oracle they didn’t
JD Edwards Cloud IaaS;
It all adds up to Soma Bay, a mas- vices, facilities management, and and Oracle really do it, they
EnterpriseOne just saw some-
sive resort community on the water sport facilities, the resort’s 9.2, including Profitability and
Cost Management thing. It seemed
Egyptian shore of the Red Sea. founders appear to have thought its Financials, obvious to them
Procurement, Cloud Service
Built on the warm desert of everything in their quest to after a while.”
Inventory —Steve Jobs
sands of Hurghada, Soma Bay’s create a first-class vacation para-
10-million-square-meter property dise—a place where everything is
is a luxury holiday and sporting carefully managed.
destination attracting visitors who Well, almost everything.

45 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne
helps us maintain
a stable operating
environment.
We have a solid
understanding
of costs and
Soma Bay can’t control over the Sinai Desert in 2015.
profitability, even exchange rates or mitigate politi- “2016 was a difficult year for Soma Bay
Development
though revenue cal upheavals. The resort opened
its doors in 1998, and it was just
the Egyptian tourism industry and
the economy in general,” confirms
Company is in
the process of
comes from over a decade later that President Mohammed Serry, CFO of Soma building 500
Hosni Mubarak was overthrown Bay Company. “Our hotel occu- vacation homes
different markets. during the Egyptian revolution of pancy rates dropped from more in six seaside
2011, which caused a sharp deval- than 50 percent in 2015 to 25 per- communities,
—Mohammed Serry, CFO, uation of the Egyptian currency. cent in the first quarter of 2016.”
and occupancy
Soma Bay Company rates are rising
And while the economy recov- But what Soma Bay’s man- at its five hotels:
ered as the political situation agement team can do is react Kempinski, The
stabilized, the tourism industry intelligently during volatile times, Westin, Sheraton,
took a US$1.3 billion hit after the thanks to the nimble information Robinson Club,
downing of a commercial airliner system that carefully monitors the and The Breakers.

46 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 operation and controls costs: a JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system
from Oracle that is connected to
applications and data residing in
Oracle Cloud. Following the sud-
den downturn in 2016, Soma Bay
used JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
profitability and cost manage-
ment capabilities to provide
detailed financial data to general
managers. “This allowed us to
carefully manage the fixed oper-
ating expenses, so we could min-
imize losses on the bottom line,”
says Serry.
Soma Bay’s JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne applications and
data reside in Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure as a Service (Oracle
Cloud IaaS), which makes it easy
for Soma Bay’s distributed organi-
zation to create cash flow reports,
accounts receivable aging reports,
project management reports, facil-
ity management reports, and key
performance indicator reports that
measure a business unit’s perfor-
mance (see sidebar “Migrating JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne to Oracle
Cloud IaaS”).
47 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
MIGRATING JD EDWARDS ENTERPRISEONE
TO ORACLE CLOUD IAAS
Soma Bay Development
Company is the first com-
pany in Egypt to move
its JD Edwards software
to Oracle Cloud IaaS.
According to Sameh Karim,
database administrator sec-
tion head at the company,
using Oracle Cloud IaaS
to host their JD Edward
EnterpriseOne system saves
time, saves money, and
improves business conti-
nuity. “Oracle Cloud IaaS
maximizes the productivity
of our workforce and stabi-
lizes our data,” Karim notes.
“We can access the data
from anywhere, anytime.
We can run any type of
workload yet keep our cap-
ital and operating expenses
to a minimum.”
Karim particularly likes
the built-in disaster-recovery
capabilities that Soma Bay
gets with Oracle Cloud
IaaS, especially after expe-
riencing a near-catastrophe
a couple years ago, when
water from an upper floor
flooded Soma Bay’s Cairo
data center. The IT team
was able to restore data and
resume operations quickly,
thanks to a backup stored in
Oracle Cloud IaaS.
Today, with all of its JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne data
and applications in Oracle
Cloud IaaS, Soma Bay has
improved its business con-
tinuity even further. “We
have minimized risk and
maximized performance for
our critical business appli-
cations,” says Karim. “We
can run any type of work-
load in the cloud, and we
have the flexibility to add
or subtract resources based
on our company needs. We
no longer need to maintain
hardware, which is perfect
for our company.”
Karim used JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne ready-
made preinstalled virtual
machines (VMs) to simplify
the migration of Soma Bay’s
on-premises JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne assets from
their data center to Oracle
Cloud IaaS.
It was easy to establish
the account details and
orchestrate the deployment
plan—he simply used the
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
components: elastic com-
pute services, storage ser-
vices, and network services.
Then he migrated the appli-
cations and data into Oracle
Cloud IaaS. “Oracle Cloud
Marketplace has a ready-
made template for
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
9.2 that includes pre-
installed images of the
VMs,” he explains. “It was
a simple lift-and-shift migra-
tion using Oracle Cloud IaaS
migration tools.”

“We went through a very
aggressive turnaround plan over
the last four years, and Oracle’s
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solu-
tions were a key factor in this
plan,” Serry continues. “We have
a solid understanding of costs
and profitability, even though rev-
enue comes from different mar-
kets and currencies. JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne helped us to
determine the effect of falling
48 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
Oracle Cloud IaaS maximizes the
productivity of our workforce and
stabilizes our data. We can access
the data from anywhere, anytime.
We can run any type of workload
yet keep our capital and operating
expenses to a minimum.
—Sameh Karim, Database Administrator Section Head,
Soma Bay Development Company
occupancy rates on the business, cations for customer experience
Sameh Karim, excluding the foreign exchange management, human capital
database
effect to measure overall perfor- management, and procurement.
administrator
section head at mance by legal entity. I believe In addition, Oracle Profitability
Soma Bay, says we have the right platform for and Cost Management Cloud
using Oracle the future.” Service streamlines financial
Cloud IaaS to host reporting and financial plan-
the company’s CLOUD CONTROL ning for the company. Serry says
JD Edwards
Increasingly, it’s a future based this cloud app reveals cost and
EnterpriseOne
system saves time on Oracle Cloud. Soma Bay is in profitability drivers on a consoli-
and money. the process of rolling out Oracle dated basis as well as by individ-
software as a service (SaaS) appli- ual business unit (hotels, home
 Being able to track every
penny we spend on a
project has revolutionized
our business.
—Cherif Samir, Financial Controller for
Soma Bay Facility Management Company
builders, laundry, golf, limousine
service, and so on), increasing
transparency into Soma Bay’s
allocation-based business pro-
cesses. The software includes
prebuilt dashboards and analyti-
cal screens that apprise him and
other managers of the profitabil-
ity and cost drivers under their
purview. This system gives Serry
and other managers a versatile
platform to connect their wide-
spread and fast-moving opera-
tion. “JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
helps us maintain a stable oper-
ating environment,” he adds.
49 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
RAPID TURNAROUND
If the tourism Thanks to quick thinking and
business is slow,
insightful reactions by Serry and
Soma Bay can
count on its real his team, Soma Bay has weath-
estate business, ered the recent downturn and
and vice created a more stable operating
versa, explains model. Occupancy rates are ris-
Cherif Samir, ing at its five hotels (Kempinski,
the financial
Sheraton, Robinson Club, The
controller for
Soma Bay Facility Westin, and The Breakers). In
Management addition, Soma Bay Development
Company. Company is in the process of
building 500 vacation homes in
six seaside communities—with
120 units completed and 380
more under construction.
“We decided to implement
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to
establish standardized business
processes across business lines
and to obtain timely reporting that
clarifies and explains the profit-
ability of each business unit via a
standard chart of accounts,” Serry
states. “Oracle offered a complete
solution that reveals the profitabil-
ity drivers and growth drivers of
the business. We now have fast,
accurate, and timely information
about profitability and costs, along
with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
One View Reporting to present
 this information to management
and ExCom.”
For example, they used the JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne software
to create currency-neutral financial
reports, helping to reconcile reve-
nue from Soma Bay’s home sales
division (which is mostly aimed at
Egyptians) and its tourism division
(which caters to Germany and
other parts of Europe) to neutral-
ize the effect of different curren-
cies on the financial results.
This mixed-revenue model is
particularly valuable to Soma Bay’s
home building division, which cur-
rently supplies about 25 percent
of corporate revenue from the
sale and maintenance of vacation
homes, and that number is grow-
ing each year.
Cherif Samir, the financial
controller for Soma Bay Facility
Management Company, says hav-
ing a dual revenue stream helps
the company expand aggressively
while mitigating risk. If the tourism
business is slow, Soma Bay can
count on the real estate business,
and vice versa, explains Samir.
But now, managers have the data
50 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
UNIQUE CAPABILITIES FOR REAL ESTATE
MANAGEMENT FIRMS
One of the things that
attracted Soma Bay IT
leaders to the JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne environment
was its unique Homebuilder
Management and Real Estate
Management modules. JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne
Homebuilder Management
helps coordinate activities
and analyze profitability
throughout Soma Bay’s
home-building cycle all the
way down to the lot level.
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
Real Estate Management
comes into play for finished
properties by streamlining
financial, operational, and
facilities management pro-
cesses. It coordinates tasks
among teams and provides
a comprehensive manage-
ment view of each unit. (As
of September 2017, Soma
Bay has gone live with JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne Real
Estate Management and is in
the process of implementing
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
Homebuilder Management.)
These JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne applications
will automate the flow of
information and revenue
from the time a homeowner
signs a contract all the way
through development, sale,
and maintenance of the
properties. “Since we went
live with the facility man-
agement functions, we have
started to capture opera-
tional KPIs [key performance
indicators] and financial KPIs
for all open job orders,”
says Cherif Samir, the finan-
cial controller for Soma
Bay Facility Management
Company. “Having a com-
plete workflow makes it eas-
ier for Soma Bay and more
seamless for the homeown-
ers. They can select ser-
vices, request maintenance,
and pay invoices online.”
Once JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne Homebuilder
Management comes online,
Soma Bay’s connected work-
flows will extend throughout
the development, sale, and
maintenance of the prop-
erties as well. “The home-
builder module will provide
a bridge between the real
estate front-office business
and the facility manage-
ment side of the business,”
Samir adds. “It will link the
construction team and the
sales team and the finance
team, with complete trans-
parency into the data. This
will be much better than the
manual process of working
through papers. Everything
will be controlled and every-
thing will be connected,
giving us visibility from the
initial feasibility studies
through development, sale,
and ongoing management
of the properties.”

they need to carefully track costs.
“This year we spent E£100 million
on new construction. Without the
insights about cash management
and cash flow that we obtain from
the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
system, we would have had a hard
time sustaining this level of expan-
sion. But now we can carefully
monitor cash flow and payments
to contractors.”
These standard functions of the
51 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
software are also valuable to line-
After years of of-business owners, as well as to
volatility, during
rank-and-file employees. Samir
which nimble
management says 95 percent of Soma Bay staff
helped to members use the JD Edwards
minimize losses EnterpriseOne software in some
on Soma Bay’s capacity, and its “connected infor-
bottom line, mation flows” boost productivity
Egypt’s tourism
in many parts of the business.
industry is on
the mend. For example, the Job Cost mod-
ule reflects the ongoing costs
incurred by the real estate busi-
10 MILLION
Size, in square meters, of
Soma Bay’s resort property
ness, which helps Samir and his
team allocate expenses for mate-
rials, labor, and other needs, as
well as track expenses against the
budgets and forecasts established
at the start of each facilities man-
agement project.
Managers can add codes to
projects and merge them with
the financial account numbers for
budgeted expenses versus actual
expenses. This helps them ver-
ify that complex projects are on
track, and enables them to share
expense data among divisions,
even when there are no physical
connections. “Being able to track
every penny we spend on a proj-
ect has revolutionized our busi-
ness,” Samir says.
ENTERING THE MODERN AGE
Samir and his team are currently
implementing the JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne Real Estate

Management and JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne Homebuilder
Management modules, which
could help them integrate their
two major business lines (see side-
bar “Unique Capabilities for Real
Estate Management Firms”).
Previously Soma Bay depended
on manual Excel-based sys-
tems, which made it difficult to
roll up information to determine
profitability drivers and to com-
pile information in time to make
proper decisions. Managers had
to manually manipulate spread-
52 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
11
Number, in kilometers, of
Soma Bay’s pristine coast-
line, which is ringed by an
unspoiled coral reef.
sheets merely to understand the
basic drivers of profitability. The
business was too reliant on the IT
department for custom reports,
and it was difficult for the com-
pany to confidently manage their
aggressive growth trajectory—
which includes the construc-
tion of 1,000 new homes over a
“Visitors come five-year period. Serry and his
for the privacy
team selected the JD Edwards
on the beach,
as well as for EnterpriseOne system because
the very high- they wanted an ERP solution that
quality services would allow them to take owner-
and foods in the ship of allocation-based business
hotels,” says processes by seamlessly combin-
Soma Bay CFO
ing data from the general ledger
Mohammed
Serry. and other financial systems with
data from operational systems.
A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
Soma Bay has leveraged tech-
nology to survive, and even
thrive, during difficult times as
they deployed the JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne software and sys-
tematically moved their informa-
tion systems to the cloud. The
company’s nimble information sys-
tems help insulate it against future
disruptions to the business, ensur-
ing an outstanding experience for
visitors and residents.
“Soma Bay has 11 kilometers of
beautiful coastline, and it’s a very
exclusive destination,” Serry con-
cludes. “Visitors come for the pri-
vacy on the beach, as well as for
the very high-quality services and
foods in the hotels. The quality of
their experience is partially due to
the way we handle information to
make sure everything contributes
to a premiere guest experience.”
David Baum is a freelance business
writer specializing in science and
technology.
ACTION ITEMS
Oracle Cloud Starter Kit
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
 25,000
Companies Run
Their Business in the
Oracle Cloud
More Enterprise Cloud Applications Than Anyone Else
LEADING STRATEGIES

PAY IT Define the mission.

FORWARD Establish the vision.

Articulate the
A strong cultural foundation is behind culture’s attributes
a global payment processing provider's
successful move into the fast-growing and beliefs. That’s
VR commerce market. what builds the
BY MONICA MEHTA
foundation.
BIG IDEAS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAFFI ALEXANDER

Shopping online just went to the next level.

Consumers are already shopping for products in vir-
tual stores using a virtual reality (VR) headset within
the experience and then having those products
delivered to their homes.
But for first time users can explore and purchase
products within that immersive VR experience, and
then make a secure, easy payment without having to
remove their headsets.
The company delivering this technology is
Payscout, a global payment processing provider.
Cleveland Brown, chief executive officer and
cofounder of Payscout, says the market is about to
explode. In 2016, VR consumer revenue was about

54 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 ART CREDIT: NAME HERE

 US$1.8 billion, mostly in hardware.
LEADING STRATEGIES
By 2020, VR consumer revenue is
expected to reach close to US$30
billion—mostly in software.
Payscout’s move into the VR
commerce market builds upon a
strong business foundation. From
2013 to 2016, Payscout’s revenue
increased by more than 850 per-
cent and the company has been on
BIG IDEAS
Inc. Magazine’s 5000 list, represent-
ing the fastest-growing privately
held companies in the United States
for four years in a row.
Profit spoke to Brown about how
he was able to put Payscout at the
forefront of this fast-growing market
by leveraging his diverse interests
and background: knowing how to
grow his company through mergers
and financial crashes and creating a
strong culture upon which to build
his business.
PROFIT: Why is VR commerce at a
tipping point?
BROWN: If you look back, the tech-
nology driver behind ecommerce
was a mouse. The ability to point
and click made the online shopping
experience frictionless, and that’s
where ecommerce exploded. Then,
the technology of tap and swipe
55 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
made the shopping experience
frictionless on a mobile device, and
that’s where mobile ecommerce
really took off.
The same thing is happening
with VR commerce. Right now, you
can navigate a space or environ-
ment by moving your head, and
you can tap. A few other elements
are being integrated as well, includ-
ing voice and gaze. As the tech-
nology makes transactions within
that environment frictionless, we’ll
see VR commerce explode in the
same way.
The difference between online
ecommerce, mobile ecommerce,
and VR commerce is that the emo-
tional engagement from being in
an immersive 360-degree experi-
ence is unlike anything we’ve ever
seen or experienced, other than
in person.
PROFIT: This technology makes
sense in a virtual shopping mall—
how about in gaming?
BROWN: It absolutely applies in
gaming, as well. We’re in discus-
sions with video game develop-
ers to enable the purchasing of
physical goods—merchandise, for
example—from within the experi-
ence. So imagine you’re playing a
mobile app–based game where
you’re building a tank or a for-
tress using digital currency in the
game—and now imagine you’re
able to use physical currency to
purchase a replication of the tank
or fortress and have it delivered to
your home.
PROFIT: Payscout is fundamen-
tally a global payment processing
provider. What led you to found
the company?
BROWN: The catalyst for Payscout
was the globalization of payments
in ecommerce. I was working
with public school districts in Los
Angeles, Texas, and Florida, and
we built out some of the first com-
munication and ecommerce plat-
forms between the schools and
the parents. They really took off.
After that, I worked with finan-
cial institutions and small countries
to build ecommerce platforms for
them. During the financial crash
of 2008, many countries wanted
to diversify their risk and think
internationally in terms of invest-
ments. We merged with another
company, and we were able to
create a true global platform for
 merchants to process payments
LEADING STRATEGIES
and reach consumers in their local
environments, within their curren-
cies and their payment methods.
PROFIT: What role does Oracle
software play in helping you reach
those consumers?
BROWN: Oracle helps us with
automation in globalized pay-
ments. The payments data is gold
BIG IDEAS
to both us and our customers, and
Oracle’s solutions help us with
reporting and reconciliation so
that we can make informed, ana-
lytical decisions about our busi-
ness as we move forward.
Oracle also helps us automate
our statements in different lan-
guages and with different curren-
cies. And the benefit of leveraging
Oracle software is that it inte-
grates with our existing card pro-
cessing and alternative payment
method platforms. As a global
payment processing provider, we
have a network of very sophisti-
cated cloud integrations. Oracle
provides that nexus that ensures
we can see the whole picture.
PROFIT: When it comes to select-
ing IT, is there any question about
choosing cloud?
56 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
BROWN: I would say there’s no
question, in terms of efficiency,
enterprise value, integrations, and
especially innovation. New compa-
nies are building value and inno-
vating by integrating APIs in cloud-
based platforms. So for me it’s not
a question. I don’t believe you can
innovate without the cloud.
PROFIT: You have a diverse back-
ground that includes philosophy,
filmmaking, and banking. How did
the diversity of your interests and
experiences inform or influence
you in business?
BROWN: Diversity in any form is
what allows innovation to take
place. It allows you to take ideas
from different elements and mold
them together to be able to create
and be innovative.
Philosophy was about asking
deeper questions, challenging
the “why” behind different theo-
rems and models in economics.
It was a very unique way to chal-
lenge my mind as an entrepreneur,
because philosophy is the process
of taking ideas and bringing them
into reality.
My background in filmmaking
was what allowed Payscout to
make the leap from payments to
VR commerce. We knew that VR
was the next stage of evolution of
SNAPSHOT storytelling, and a powerful vehi-
cle for immersive experiences,
PAYSCOUT
payscout.com from the Sundance Film Festival.
When VR landed at Sundance,
Headquarters:
Los Angeles, we saw lines form 24 hours
California ahead to experience the content.
Industry: People were very excited about
Financial services it, and seeing their reactions, we
Employees: knew there was something very
48 specific there.
Revenue: From that moment, two ideas
US$24.2 million came together in my mind: virtual
reality and the monetization of the
CLEVELAND experience. I was able to innovate
BROWN by bringing together these two
CEO divergent concepts, filmmaking
Length of tenure: and payments, to become the first
6 years in the world to deliver a true, fric-
Education: tionless VR commerce solution.
BA in philosophy, PROFIT: What would you say is
University of the foundation behind leading
California, Los
a successful company through
Angeles
the startup phase, mergers, and
Personal quote/ financial crashes?
mantra:
"Define your BROWN: The key to being suc-
culture." cessful in being a leader and
growing a business is defining and
building a culture that allows it to
operate, engage, and grow. That
LEADING STRATEGIES
BIG IDEAS
foundation of culture comes from
abstract ideas like integrity, trust,
reliability, innovation, and fun. It
also comes from defined priorities
such as “best idea wins,” “feed-
back welcomed,” “customer hap-
piness,” and “always learning.”
Once you have a culture
defined, it guides your decision-
making. Take young entrepreneurs
who have an idea. How are you
going to figure out which direction
to go in? Culture gives you a guide
to choosing a path. And once you
have a guide to choose a path,
then your decisions become much
57 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
Diversity in any form is what allows
innovation to take place.
more clear, because you have the
same foundation to make each
decision on.
PROFIT: What is the most import-
ant piece of advice you have for
entrepreneurs looking to operate
in the current economy?
BROWN: What I would tell a young
entrepreneur is to lead by exam-
ple when it comes to inspiring
those who you want to follow you.
I do that by volunteering my time.
I mentor young entrepreneurs and
talk to them about the importance
of establishing culture. It’s the best
advice I can give.
So many entrepreneurs come
up with great ideas. The question
becomes, how do you build a pro-
cess to bring this idea to fruition?
And the answer is creating cul-
ture. Define the mission. Establish
the vision. Articulate the culture’s
attributes and beliefs. That’s what
builds the foundation.
The ideas will evolve through
the implementation of culture and
take you through that learning
curve of making those ideas suc-
cessful in our current economy.
With a strong cultural foundation,
everyone is speaking the same
language. And when we’re speak-
ing the same language, then it’s
easy to follow the logic of the
decision-making.
Monica Mehta is a San Francisco
Bay Area–based freelance writer
and a frequent contributor to Profit.
ACTION ITEMS
Special Report: Finance
Quick Tour: Enterprise Resource
Management
 STUMBLING BLOCKS
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

The four biggest challenges SMBs face

BY MINDA ZETLIN

Ten years ago, Reggie Bradford started Vitrue, a

provider of a web-based platform that companies such
BIG IDEAS

as Weather.com and CNN used to let customers and

other users upload videos to their websites. But as usage
grew, Vitrue’s technology proved unequal to the task. “It
literally shut down based on substantial load,” Bradford
says. “We were working with three large publishers, and
they all fired us within a month or two.” Then the Great
Recession hit. Vitrue seemed headed for oblivion.
It’s one of the major challenges that often plague
small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and startups: nei-
ther Vitrue’s business model nor its technology was
especially scalable. Given the constant challenges of
startup life, Bradford had little time to think strategically
about his company. Instead, he made another common
SMB mistake. “We tried to plug everything in that cus-
tomers wanted us to,” he recalls. It was one reason sys-
tems buckled under a heavier traffic load.
But Vitrue was Bradford’s third startup, and as a sea-
soned entrepreneur he understood the importance of
cash. And so, even though he’d just received US$10 mil-
lion in venture capital funding intended to be used to
expand the business, he retrenched instead. “We went

58 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 ILLUSTR ATION: WES ROWELL

 into cost-saving mode,” he says.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
“We went from 86 employees,
including offshore contractors,
to 20.”
The company stopped adding
new clients for six months while
the IT team created more-robust
systems and the executive team
planned a pivot. What emerged at
the end of 2008 was a new version
of Vitrue—a cloud-based platform
BIG IDEAS
that social networks could use to
help brands market to their users.
Bradford pitched the concept to
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg,
and she signed on. “Then they
came out with Facebook Pages,
and we began selling to enterprise
customers left and right,” he says.
Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram
soon became partners as well.
The company grew quickly, reach-
ing 180 employees by the time it
was acquired by Oracle in 2012
for US$300 million. Bradford
is now senior vice president of
Oracle’s Startup Ecosystem and
Accelerator Group.
Vitrue’s story is a perfect illus-
tration of what can go wrong
when startups and SMBs encoun-
ter the obstacles that typically
59 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
bedevil small companies and how
smart leaders can overcome them.
Here’s a closer look at some of the
biggest challenges.
CHALLENGE 1: PEOPLE
Hiring needed talent in a tight
labor market is difficult for com-
panies of every size. But it can be
especially tough for small compa-
nies, because they lack the deep
pockets and marquee names of
their larger competitors and often
can’t match a larger company’s
salary or perks.
At the same time, the stakes
are higher. “In a small business,
every contributor makes a differ-
ence,” says Deborah Sweeney,
CEO of MyCorporation.com,
which provides online document
filing services to startups and
small businesses. Originally a divi-
sion of Intuit, the company was
spun off in 2008 and now has 52
employees. Hiring someone “can
be super positive, like when you
find people who have grit and a
great mindset,” she says. “But a
bad apple can have a very nega-
tive influence very quickly.”
This is why many small business
In a small business, every
contributor makes a difference.
—DEBORAH SWEENEY, CEO, MYCORPORATION.COM
owners put a great deal of
time and effort into every hire.
Marc Prosser, cofounder of
FitSmallBusiness.com, a website
that publishes content for small
business owners, says he reviews
more than 400 résumés for every
position he fills. At MyCorporation
.com, Sweeney and her team
interview every candidate multi-
ple times: over the phone and in
person and in informal situations
as well as office settings. She tries
to have people from every level of
the company involved in the inter-
view process.
Hiring, she adds, is something
few entrepreneurs get right. “In
my observation, they tend to be
a little whimsical in their interview
process and then they cross their
fingers,” she says. They also tend
to hire people like themselves.
 “That’s not the greatest,” she
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

notes. Because Sweeney herself

tends to react quickly to chal-
lenges, she tries to hire people
who are calmer and more analyti-
cal, “so not everyone on my team
How to Plan
runs when I say, ‘Let’s run!’” Your Company’s Future(s)
How do you get people to
want to work for your SMB? Many The biggest challenge able people working with “Smaller organizations
facing many entrepre- you and then do some- are so focused on deliv-
small businesses use their culture
neurs is one they’re barely thing most entrepreneurs ery, and they’re lean,”
as a selling point—for instance,
BIG IDEAS

MyCorporation.com is a free-
wheeling place where people have
dance parties when paychecks are
handed out. “The other day we
had Hungry Hungry Hippos and
balloons,” Sweeney says.
At Vitrue, Bradford overcame
some hiring challenges by part-
nering with nearby Georgia Tech
and Morehouse College to recruit
recent grads. He looked for the
right attitude and when he found
it, “we were not afraid to bring
in very young, inexperienced
employees to train up,” he says.
Once they have new skills,
these young employees may leave
for higher-paying positions else-
where. “You’re training people
who will then get sucked up by
Google or one of those places.
aware of: caught up in the
hectic work of running a
growing company, they
can’t or don’t take the
time to think strategically
about the future. In other
words, they’re working in
the business rather than
on the business.
“To be successful,
entrepreneurs should
not be working in the
business more than 50
percent of the time,”
says ERPA founder and
Destination Success
author Sri Gaddam. If
that seems impossible,
he says, you should first
make sure you have reli-
are very bad at: delegate says Jeff Skipper, CEO of
some of your workload. Jeff Skipper Consulting.
Once you free up 50 “It’s more challenging to
percent of your work think about who’s going
time, what should you do to take your place or
with it? Spend some of take the place of a more
it mentoring and coach- senior leader.”
ing employees, some One other thing, he
reading articles, and says: “Don’t get fixated
some taking classes or on one possible future.”
attending industry net- It might be tough for your
working events where organization to plan for
talking to your peers is several different scenarios
bound to make you think instead of just one, but
in new ways about your you should do just that,
own company, Gaddam he says. “Think about the
recommends. fact that there may be
Making a succession several possible futures.
plan is another way to Keep that flexibility in
think about the future. your mind.”

60 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 You’re sort of a farm,” Bradford
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
says. But he doesn’t resent it, not-
ing, “They can go elsewhere and
literally double their salaries.”
CHALLENGE 2: MONEY
How do you find the capital you
need to launch, grow the business,
and survive the times when you’re
not making a profit? Venture capi-
tal funding comes with a downside,
BIG IDEAS
because investors are always look-
ing for an “exit”—either that you
will be acquired or take the com-
pany public—usually within five to
seven years. Bradford says that’s a
trade-off he was willing to make.
“I always had this philosophy that
I would rather have a small piece
of a big pie than a big piece of no
pie.” However, venture capitalists
will only consider companies that
have the potential to grow to hun-
dreds of millions of dollars.
Other alternatives include busi-
ness loans (if you’ve already been
in business for a few years and
have solid revenues); financing
from the vendors you work with;
or taking out personally guaran-
teed loans, such as a home equity
loan. If you have good credit,
61 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
that’s a viable option, but a risky
one. “If the business fails, not
only has it failed, but you’ll spend
a long period of time paying it
back,” says Prosser.
Then there’s bootstrapping—
starting a company without any
outside capital at all—something
that’s a lot easier today than it
was in past decades, given the
wide availability of inexpensive
cloud-based services. That’s how
FitSmallBusiness.com got off the
ground. “The startup cost for an
internet business is very small,
so my partner and I could start
out basically with sweat equity,”
Prosser says.
Any funding is a precious
resource to be used with care. “It’s
so hard to decide where to spend
your money as a business owner,”
Sweeney says. A former Intuit
executive, she quickly learned that
small companies need to manage
resources more carefully than large
ones. For example, Intuit often
hired outside counsel for its legal
work. “I realized that was going
to be very expensive,” she says. A
lawyer by training, she decided to
do the legal work herself, adding
to her already full plate as com-
pany CEO. It took a lot of her time,
but it saved MyCorporation.com
around US$200,000.
“First and foremost is cash
flow,” says Sri Gaddam, founder of
ERPA, an Oracle Platinum Partner
specializing in Oracle’s PeopleSoft,
Oracle Database, business intelli-
gence, and big data solutions and
the author of Destination Success:
Discovering the Entrepreneurial
Journey (Morgan James Publishing,
2017). “Some entrepreneurs get
very passionate, they run out of
cash, and then they’re out of busi-
ness,” he adds.
It’s hard to know not just what
to spend but also when to spend.
Let’s say you see a business
opportunity your company can
take advantage of—if it hires new
employees. “If you are too early,
you could wind up running out
of cash,” he says. “If you wait too
late, you lose the opportunity.”
CHALLENGE 3: TECHNOLOGY
Which technology to buy, how
much to get, and when to get
it are other challenges small
businesses frequently face.
 “Technology should make life eas-
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
ier, not more difficult,” says ERPA’s
Gaddam. “You should be able
to do more with fewer people.
If technology is not helping you
to do that, or to do things faster,
then you don’t need it.”
It’s often worthwhile to hire
a consultant to give you some
perspective on technology
options. “For a long time, I tried
BIG IDEAS
to resist that,” Sweeney says.
“Eventually, I realized I would be
more successful paying someone
[US]$10,000 up front to figure out
what was going on than continu-
ing to pay developers basically to
tread water.”
These days of cloud-based
everything can help put small
companies on an even playing
field with large ones, Bradford
adds, and they should take advan-
tage of cloud and as-a-service
offerings as much as possible.
“There are greater capabilities and
lower cost, and that’s where all
the R&D is happening,” he says.
“You’re going to get the best
upgrades and the best path to the
future. You always want to future-
proof your technology.”
62 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
CHALLENGE 4: GROWTH
Once you have a successful busi-
ness, scaling can present a whole
new challenge. “I work with a lot
of companies around the issue of
growth,” says Jeff Skipper, CEO of
Jeff Skipper Consulting, who has
advised such companies as IBM,
AT&T, and Goldman Sachs, as well
as small and startup companies.
“They’re growing, they’re making
lots of money, but at some point
there’s a switch between operat-
ing a small ad hoc business where
everyone is helping to get every-
thing done, to a different level. I
see a lot of small businesses strug-
gling with this transition.”
That happened to ERPA.
“When we started our business,
it used to double every year,”
Gaddam says. “Once we hit
[US]$10 million in annual reve-
nue and 100 employees, people
started talking about standard
operating procedures and key
performance indicators. I had to
hire salespeople, which was a chal-
lenge for me.”
In response, Gaddam com-
pleted an executive MBA program,
followed by the Owner/President
Management program at Harvard
Business School. “Everyone
doesn’t need to do that, but if
they look three to five years ahead
at what’s coming, they’ll know
they need to learn,” he says. That
learning can happen outside of
a formal educational program by
joining a trade or professional
group or learning from custom-
ers or suppliers. But it needs to
happen. Successful entrepreneurs
must keep on learning; otherwise,
they might not be the leaders their
startups need for the long term.
“Companies can outgrow individu-
als,” he says.
Minda Zetlin is a coauthor, with
Bill Pfleging, of The Geek Gap:
Why Business and Technology
Professionals Don’t Understand
Each Other and Why They Need
Each Other to Survive (Prometheus
Books, 2016).
ACTION ITEMS
Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator
Program
The Business of GO: Oracle
SMB blog
 TOOLS FOR GROWTH
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Building up to an IPO? Looking for venture capital? To meet market scrutiny, SMBs and startups
need finance and accounting systems that work together seamlessly.
BY DAVID F. CARR

Growing companies tend to be focused on achieving

BIG IDEAS

more growth—not necessarily accounting for it. And

who can blame their leaders for wanting to do more of
whatever has brought them success so far? Yet in this
global, hyperconnected economy, it’s easy for small-
to-medium businesses (SMBs) to get too far ahead of
themselves, creating complexity they are unprepared to
manage or outrunning their cash flow.
For example, it’s increasingly common for startups
and SMBs to open an overseas division, which may
mean creating a separate legal entity for that part of
the business, with accounting that needs to be tracked
separately as well as consolidated into the records of the
entire enterprise. “Very small businesses are outsourcing
to India or doing business in Asia,” says Joe Knight, a
coauthor of the Financial Intelligence book series from
Harvard Business Review and an authority on financial
literacy. “In general, the complexity of business is going
way down-market—and often these businesses don’t
have the tools to deal with that or the sophistication
that’s required.”
The good news is that delivering software via the

63 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 ILLUSTR ATION: WES ROWELL

 cloud makes both enterprise
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
resource planning (ERP) and enter-
prise performance management
(EPM) software more accessible
to businesses of all sizes, both in
terms of price and ease of use.
And that can have an impact
beyond overseas expansion. “If
a small business can get access
to the high-level tools that are
used by the major corporations,
BIG IDEAS
they will have a huge advantage
in terms of preparing themselves
for an IPO or sale,” Knight says.
“If you want to sell your business,
you will have to be able to fore-
cast and project and budget.
Or let me put it this way: you
will if you want to sell it for a lot
more money.”
STARTING SIMPLE
Growing businesses tend to
start with the cheapest, simplest
accounting software they can find
and outsource the responsibility
for managing the numbers to an
accountant, Knight says. One fun-
damental thing founders often fail
to understand is the difference
between accounting, the accurate
recording of historical, transac-
64 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
tional data, and finance, which is
more focused on forward-looking
analysis: budgeting; planning; and
making projections of income,
cash flow, liabilities, and the value
of the firm.
Yet it is the future of the busi-
ness, not its historical performance,
that investors care about when
evaluating a growing firm for an
IPO or as an acquisition target.
The problem with failing to
distinguish between accounting
and finance is that the two require
different skill sets—and different
software. Even after a business
graduates from small-business
accounting software to an ERP
system, its leaders may fail to
invest in financial analysis soft-
ware—and in people who know
how to get the most out of it.
Because EPM software evolved to
meet the complex financial needs
of multinational corporations,
they may consider it beyond their
reach or requirements. So they
use ERP for their accounting but
make do with spreadsheets for
financial analysis.
The forward-looking perspec-
tive that comes from financial anal-
If you want to sell your business,
you will have to be able to
forecast and project and budget.
—JOE KNIGHT, COAUTHOR, FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE
ysis is all-important to an investor
or a buyer, agrees Brian Moran,
founder of the website Small
Business Edge and an advisor to
small businesses. “It’s not what
your company has done but what
your company can do for me, the
buyer, that they care about,” says
Moran. “If you can’t articulate that,
and it’s your company, how much
trust do I have in what you’re pre-
senting to me?”
Whether you’re selling your
company or just raising capital,
you must have a compelling and
convincing presentation about the
value of your business, he adds.
And beyond making the case
for acquisition or investment, fail-
ing to invest in financial analysis
can be fatal to an SMB—particu-
 larly when it comes to cash flow
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
projections, Knight says. Most
businesses fail not necessarily
because they aren’t profitable but
because “they miss payroll, and
everyone goes home,” he says.
Your business will be in far bet-
ter shape if it has an automated
model for cash flow analysis—
which, Knight observes, few grow-
ing companies do.
BIG IDEAS
SO LONG, SPREADSHEETS
Until a few years ago, online
advertising exchange OpenX was
an example of an organization
so focused on sales and product
development that it was difficult to
get attention for accounting and
finance, recalls Michelle Alfonso,
who recently left her post as vice
president and controller at the
company. Alfonso has built a
career working with fast-growth
companies at just about the point
where they’re starting to consider
an IPO or sale of the company,
usually US$100 million in reve-
nue or more, and she regards
implementing Oracle Financials
Cloud at OpenX as one of her
signal achievements.
65 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
EPM in the Cloud:
Adding Value from the Get-Go
As solution consultants in The historical rea- tunity to add value from
Oracle’s sales organiza- sons for the divisions do the get-go,” Gobbo
tion, Michael Gobbo and not matter to custom- says, noting that today’s
Jeff Jacoby have become ers, he says. The Oracle growing companies
evangelists for making Hyperion products at may never have to
enterprise resource plan- the heart of Oracle’s experience the pain of
ning (ERP) and enterprise EPM suite were origi- software integration.
performance manage- nally developed inde- Jacoby notes that as
ment (EPM) even more pendent of ERP solu- an organization grows in
tightly connected in the tions from a company complexity—for example,
cloud (see their blog Oracle acquired more by adding international
post “Closing the Chasm than a decade ago. Yet operations—company
Between ERP and EPM”). while some technology leaders may not real-
As a result of their architecture distinctions ize what they’re getting
internal lobbying, plus persist, that complexity themselves into. “But
feedback from customers, is invisible in the cloud, we do, because we’ve
Oracle is in the process where Oracle manages solved for that,” he says,
of delivering more EPM the back-end systems and adding that rather than
functions such as bud- presents an integrated merely treating the finan-
geting and planning as user experience. cial software as a repos-
part of Oracle ERP Cloud. “For the emerging itory for data and a way
“We want to start think- business or the SMB to produce reports, “the
ing about these as a sin- [small-to-medium busi- new way is to wield it as a
gular thing,” Gobbo says. ness], this is an oppor- competitive weapon.”
 When she joined OpenX in
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

2014, Alfonso already knew what

a complete and integrated finance
and accounting system could do
Now that we have this platform, I’ll never have to
for her company. A couple years tell my executive team that our accounting system
earlier, in a similar role at for-
eign exchange aggregator FXall,
can’t do something. We’ve got the foundation to
she had worked to establish an adapt to whichever way we take our company.
efficient data pipeline between
—STEVEN VAN HOUTEN, CFO, THE RANCON GROUP
accounting and finance systems
while gearing up for FXall’s 2012
BIG IDEAS

IPO. Later, when Thomson Reuters

bought FXall, finance profes-
sionals from the acquiring com-
pany offered praise for how the
strength of those systems made
the transition easier.
“We didn’t have EPM at
the time the IPO plans were
announced, but [implement-
ing] it was the very first decision
we made,” she says. Then she
worked with the IT department to
make sure ERP data would flow
smoothly into the new EPM sys-
tem. “On my final annual close,
before I left FXall, we closed the
books on Day One of the new
year. That’s just crazy!”
After that experience, she says,
“I thought, I can just do this wher-
ever I go now! Well, I found out it
is not that easy.”
When Alfonso arrived at
OpenX, she observed that
accounting and finance weren’t
playing on the same team—as
is common, they were sepa-
rate organizations reporting to
the CFO. Without software to
help smooth the flow of data,
the finance team was constantly
complaining that accounting was
too slow to deliver information.
Meanwhile, company leaders were
demanding sophisticated analysis
as they evaluated acquisitions of
other companies and considered
options such as an IPO.
“When I first arrived, people
were producing reporting and
analysis in Excel—that’s what
most companies do, unfortu-
nately,” Alfonso says. While
accountants and finance pros are
comfortable with spreadsheets,
she worried about too much copy-
and-pasting of numbers, with
manual adjustments. “I couldn’t
be sure that everything was in the
right buckets and we weren’t
double-counting anything.”
To sell company leaders on
upgrading their accounting and
finance software, however, Alfonso
had to move the focus beyond
her own unease with the current

66 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

 processes. She convinced them
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
that the company was wasting too
much time working around the
shortcomings of its systems. With
the right software, she insisted,
“you can spend the extra time
running your business, growing
your business, instead of doing all
that ad hoc stuff.”
Having a cloud software
option to recommend helped
BIG IDEAS
a lot, she says. Having experi-
enced on-premises ERP and EPM
implementations that could cost
US$500,000 to US$1 million and
require a 10-year commitment to
realize their value, “I was shocked
by how cost efficient it was to
move to Oracle Cloud,” she says.
Another huge benefit of adopt-
ing both ERP and EPM in the
cloud was that OpenX skipped
the step of having to organize an
IT project to integrate them—
more of the data mapping hap-
pens automatically, in the back-
ground. And once OpenX made
the transition to the cloud, the
speed of its reporting and analysis
changed dramatically. Previously,
it could take a half day of work
to make a journal entry and run
67 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
through all the adjustments nec-
essary to generate an updated
report, Alfonso says. Now,
that same process takes under
three minutes.
In addition, once finance
department staff could get their
numbers on demand, they “acted
much more like partners” with her
accounting team, Alfonso says,
“where if they spotted something
unusual they would say, ‘please
check into that—and let us know if
we can help.’”
MANAGING COMPLEXITY
Steven Van Houten, CFO at
the Rancon Group, says he was
motivated to implement Oracle
Financials Cloud when the busi-
ness became too complex to
manage without an integrated
and scalable financial manage-
ment solution that could meet
the needs of a global company.
Founded in 1971, the company
currently controls thousands of
acres of residential, commercial,
industrial, self-storage, and resort
properties. Rancon operates a
network of real estate businesses,
including investment, develop-
ment, operations, brokerage, and
escrow organized around more
than 100 legal entities.
“We had done all of that on
the back of QuickBooks,” Van
Houten explains. “That meant
logging in to multiple instances
of QuickBooks and depend-
ing on spreadsheets to analyze
and reconcile our financial and
accounting data.”
Having worked with enterprise
software in previous roles at large
homebuilders, Van Houten knew
what he was missing. But the com-
pany had had a bad experience
with its first attempt to implement
an enterprise financial system,
before Van Houten joined in 2011.
He didn’t revisit the issue until
2014, when the economy was on
the upturn and he became aware
of what Oracle was offering in
the cloud.
With the cloud, “a small busi-
ness like Rancon can have an ERP
system that gives it the same tools
a Fortune 100 company has,” Van
Houten says. “Now that we have
this platform, I'll never have to
tell my executive team that our
accounting system can’t do some-
 thing. We’ve got the foundation to
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
adapt to whichever way we take
our company.”
While it’s difficult to general-
ize about when a business should
make the jump to enterprise-class
accounting and finance software,
Van Houten says that for him the
moment came when he and his
staff were doing more and more
work in spreadsheets to overcome
BIG IDEAS
the shortfalls of their existing
applications. “That’s what made
it crystal clear to us that we did
not have software that supported
the complexity we were trying to
take on.”
MARCHING TOWARD
A STRATEGY
Marc Hadd, engagement director
at US-Analytics, says many of the
consulting firm’s SMB clients have
a similar story of great complexity
even at a modest size. “In oil and
gas, for example, not every com-
pany is Exxon-size. Quite a few
are run by a lean corporate staff
plus field engineers, and yet they
do joint ventures with other firms
and may operate in multiple cur-
rencies.” This means their account-
68 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
ing is so complex that handling it
with spreadsheets is too difficult
and error-prone—especially when
there are products, and cloud
solutions in particular, made to
address this challenge. The cloud
is the paradigm shift—run small
and lean, but act big.
The cloud has allowed com-
panies such as Oracle to deliver
capabilities as modular services
for specific needs, Hadd says. “It
means I don’t have to swallow the
entire ERP as if I was on premises,”
he says. “At that point, why would
I design my firm in an inefficient
manner if it means I’m going to
have to retool later?” The cloud
allows the SMB firm to scale and
implement the needed level of
financial transaction systems. The
modular nature of the cloud allows
the SMB firm to complement ERP
with EPM tools. Now the firm can
design its systems with the end in
mind, while making a modest ini-
tial investment.
Whether your business plans
to go public, get acquired, or
raise money, having a robust and
repeatable process for financial
analysis puts you in a position to
be more successful in the first
place. When talking to investors,
Hadd says, “I can be fully pre-
pared to answer questions about
my growth, my needs for capital,
and my spend.” A professional
presentation shows why your
company is worth investing in, he
says. “I’m showing that I have a
business strategy and I know how
to march toward that strategy.”
More than just providing presen-
tation capabilities, a solid finan-
cial analytics process permits the
SMB to react to the marketplace.
It flattens the organization’s com-
munication hierarchy—leadership,
analysts, and customer-facing
employees can consume the
same data and collaboratively
make decisions.
David F. Carr is a freelance writer, a
student of digital business, and the
author of Social Collaboration for
Dummies (Wiley, 2013).
ACTION ITEMS
Free Trial of Oracle Cloud Oracle
Oracle ERP Cloud for Midsize
Your Complete Guide to Modern ERP
Oracle Cloud
Applications
HCM
Human Capital
Recruiting ERP
Talent Financials
Procurement
CRM Projects
Sales
Supply Chain
Service
Marketing

More Enterprise SaaS Applications

Than Any Other Cloud Services Provider
START YOUR ENGINES

New consumer consumption models

aren’t just for a few niche players—
they represent a fundamental shift
with huge implications for large
enterprises, midsize businesses, and
small companies across many types
of industries.
PERSPECTIVE

With consumers embrac- disruption, is coming fast to

ing on-demand ride-sharing stable bricks-and-mortar-
(think Lyft) and hospitality based economies.
services (think Airbnb), pro- The upheaval is being
gressive business managers driven by millennials who

ON-DEMAND are coming to an important

realization. New consumption
prefer to consume a service
rather than purchase a prod-

WORLD
JASBIR SINGH, Vice President of Enterprise Resource
Planning and Supply-Chain Management Applications,
Oracle Asia Pacific
models aren’t just for a few
niche players—they represent
a fundamental shift with huge
implications for large enter-
prises, midsize businesses, and
small companies across many
types of industries. The shift,
or what is commonly called
uct. Pay per use for the out-
come is the current mindset.
Why buy a refrigerator when
the need is refrigeration, and
why engage an HVAC con-
tractor when you could get
a smart home service con-
tractor? This powerful cohort

70 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017 PHOTOGR APH: NAMAS BHOJANI

 is fast becoming a majority
START YOUR ENGINES

of the buying public. Within

a couple years, millennials
will represent about a third
As their spending power increases, [millennials are]
of US adults, and by 2025 bringing a new perspective to the marketplace, essentially
they will comprise approxi-
mately three-quarters of the
asking, ‘Why buy when you can share?’
workforce. As their spend-
ing power increases, they’re
bringing a new perspective to
PERSPECTIVE

the marketplace, essentially
asking, “Why buy when you
can share?”
Global management con-
sulting firms have a name for
how businesses are respond-
ing: everything as a service
(XaaS). Deloitte describes it
as a strategic and operational
blueprint that could soon
upend business models.
Whether large or small,
companies can successfully
cash in on this trend if they’re
visionary enough to create
consumption-oriented busi-
ness models. Fortunately,
there’s a clear way to make
this fundamental internal shift
and do it before digital insur-
gents dominate their respec-
tive markets. Business-model
change is built on four key
steps: sense and measure,
think, monetize, and bill.
The sense and measure
step takes advantage of
innovations such as Oracle
Internet of Things Cloud
Service to monitor assets,
activity volume, and usage
parameters for on-demand
or “consumption-based”
services. For example, com-
panies might create “laundry
as a service” for consum-
ers who’d rather not pur-
chase appliances outright.
Using Internet of Things
(IoT) sensors, these compa-
nies monitor laundry usage
patterns based on time,
load per wash, and continu-
ous use (stress), and charge
customers accordingly.
The think step also capital-
izes on innovation, in this case
the advanced machine learn-
ing and artificial intelligence
algorithms also available in
Oracle Internet of Things
Cloud Service. Thinking and
processing terabytes of data
and identifying patterns are
what will help business lead-
ers make on-the-fly decisions
about pricing and discounts
based on real-time demand,
seasonal factors, or other
market dynamics.
Collecting recurring ser-
vices revenues is easier than
ever with the arrival of Oracle
Monetization Cloud, which
enables companies to con-
sume various streaming ser-
vices data, process the bill in
real time, and monetize it.
At the end of each month,
billing data flows from this
IoT monetization billing cloud
service to a cloud-based
enterprise resource planning
platform for management
revenue reporting and analy-
sis. Because the monetization
and billing services use the
same data model, financial
managers can monitor ser-
vices revenues in real time.
They can closely track reve-
nues from each on-demand
asset and customer, and they
can turn to machine learning
technology again to make
pricing adjustments, such
as giving special offers to
important customers.

71 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017

START YOUR ENGINES
Small-to-medium businesses can quickly modernize their
business models for an on-demand world.
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Cloud’s low barrier of entry
PERSPECTIVE
means forward-thinking
enterprises and small-to-
medium businesses (SMBs)
can quickly modernize their
business models for an
on-demand world. Cloud also
gives companies an efficient
way to capitalize on applica-
tion and service updates over
time to address the changes
that will continue to come
with technology innovation
and business disruption.
The combination of on-
demand business models and
cloud services for businesses
unleashes exciting opportuni-
ties. Consider a health insur-
ance company that creates an
app to promote discounts on
premiums for policyholders
who share lifestyle information
72 PROFIT MAGAZINE FALL 2017
streamed from IoT monitors.
This could influence custom-
ers to make healthier choices
and potentially reduce what
the company pays out in
claims each year.
Now imagine the new rev-
enue streams that are pos-
sible. Let’s say a beverage
company wants to promote a
new low-calorie yogurt drink
targeted to health-conscious
consumers. An insurer agrees
to promote the product in its
app by guaranteeing that a
half-million of its healthy-
lifestyle customers will receive
an ad. Next, in exchange for
a percentage of the sales, the
insurer further guarantees that
at least 1,000 of its customers
will buy the drink.
In this case, the insurance
company isn’t only making
money via XaaS; it’s also open-
ing new revenue streams from
a valuable ecosystem it has
created for business partners.
There’s a fast way for
enterprises and SMBs to pros-
per in an on-demand econ-
omy: start by ingesting the
right cloud-delivered business
services. This, in turn, enables
leaders to offer innovative
and profitable outward-facing
services for the rising tide of
on-demand customers.
Jasbir Singh is Vice President
of Enterprise Resource
Planning and Supply-Chain
Management Applications,
Oracle Asia Pacific
ACTION ITEM
Your Product as a Service