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Contributed by Shawn Price, Senior Vice President, Cloud, Oracle

IT's focus increasingly will shift from support to innovation, thanks to the automation in the cloud

Using cloud resources, companies don't have to have their own IT pros doing tasks such as patching a database, backing it up, or setting up data encryption and disaster recovery. Companies don't have to buy, install, and configure hardware systems, nor manage, cool, and power a large data center.

With Oracle Database Cloud Service, for example, many of the tasks for provisioning and installation are completely automated. Oracle believes that you should focus your time and resources on doing what matters the most - those things that have the greatest impact on your business. Don't assemble the information, take advantage of it. Who better than to build and manage Oracle Database than Oracle. Let us do that work for you.

Automation frees up internal IT organizations to focus time and resources on developing creative new tools that directly improve how customers buy or employees work-whether that's building mobile apps, harnessing data to improve operations, or working with business units to improve operations.

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About the Author

Shawn Price is senior vice president of cloud for Oracle. Reporting directly to Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, Price has global responsibility for Oracle's data as a service (DaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) businesses.

Prior to joining Oracle, Price was president of global cloud at SAP, where he reported to the board of directors and was responsible for global P&L across on-premises and cloud applications. During his tenure at SAP, Business Insider named Price one of the 39 most influential people in cloud computing.

As a 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley, Price led three companies to successful IPOs; the largest of these had a market capitalization of $10B. During this time he relied on his experience as an entrepreneur to become a successful venture capitalist and investor.

Price is a charter member of the C100, a Silicon Valley nonprofit organization for Canadian entrepreneurs. He speaks at various industry events on monetization and growth strategies, end-to-end cloud transformation, mergers and acquisition strategies, and venture capital.

Price holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Western Ontario.