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cloud

Sep 17

Oracle Wins Over Microsoft and SAP in the Cloud ERP BigTech Battle

By | Blog, Cloud & Infrastructure

As part of our enterprise platform services research, we reached out to 15 global IT service providers and some of their key enterprise clients to understand their views on the leading cloud ERP vendors: Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle ERP Cloud, and SAP S/4 HANA.

We then analyzed their input against five important parameters.

Who’s the winner? Oracle ERP Cloud.

Here’s a drill-down on our analysis of the five parameters.

Technology sophistication/product excellence

Microsoft and SAP are still struggling to migrate all the on-premise functionalities to their cloud offerings. In fact, many of the enterprises we spoke with consider Dynamics 365 and S/4 HANA simplified versions of their on-premise offering, but with some functionality gaps. On the other hand, Oracle has made significant headway in its migration and is stepping up to integrate emerging technology capabilities into its cloud offering. Microsoft and SAP also lack case study-based proof points that demonstrate the maturity of their solution.

Ease of implementation and integration

Although implementation completion time is consistent among the three vendors’ cloud offerings, there are significant variations among their ease of integration. Because of its Fusion middleware, Oracle ERP Cloud is considerably easier to integrate with on-premise systems and other third-party applications than the others. SAP ranks lowest on this parameter, mainly because of challenges associated with integrating other SAP cloud offerings, such as SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, and Hybris, with the core S/4 HANA and on-premise SAP products.

Commercial flexibility

Here, Microsoft fares better than both Oracle and SAP. It has a friendlier licensing model wherein it bundles its cloud ERP offering with CRM and other Microsoft products. In comparison, SAP’s limited features and functionalities make mid-sized enterprises its largest buyer group. And Oracle’s hosting environment isn’t particularly flexible; it is pushing to keep the NetSuite and Oracle ERP Cloud workloads in-house on the Oracle platform.

Talent availability

Because of Oracle’s and SAP’s strong presence in the on-premise ERP market, there’s an abundance of talent with the knowledge to be upskilled to implement, integrate, and manage their cloud-based offerings. In fact, supply is larger than demand. But Microsoft is struggling here, with a ~20 percent demand-supply gap for trained developers and integration consultants.

Overall customer experience

Over the past few years, Oracle has been able to improve its end-user experience with software updates. Microsoft is trying to create a better customer experience with its integrated enterprise offering. Dynamics 365 engagements are no longer just standalone ERP or CRM engagements; instead, oriented around a transformational impact message, they also encompass Office 365, Azure cloud services, and the Power platform. SAP is creating a better customer experience by collaborating effectively with its clients on implementation and maintenance issues. But it still delivers an inconsistent user experience between its on-premise and cloud version. While all three vendors have made strides in delivering a better customer experience, Oracle rose to the top on this parameter.

Our analysis shows that Oracle ERP Cloud is the clear, present winner in the war among the top three vendors. Although Microsoft and SAP are catching up with Dynamics 365 and S/4 HANA, and are doing great in specific niches, it will take some time before they evolve their offerings and establish some credible proof points across different industries.

Watch this space for additional blogs on the kind of challenges enterprises are facing with cloud ERP adoption, and what they should do to tackle them.

What has been your experience with cloud ERP? Please write to us at [email protected] and [email protected].

Jul 23

The Top Three Cloud Vendors Are Fighting An Ugly War, And It’s Only Going To Get Uglier | Blog

By | Blog, Cloud & Infrastructure, Uncategorized

With the massive size of the public cloud market, it’s reasonable to assume that there’s plenty of pie for each the top three vendors –Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure (Azure) – to get their fill.

But the truth is that they’re all battling to capture even larger slices. While this type of war has happened in other technology segments, this one is unique because the market is growing at 30-40 percent year-over-year.

Here are a few examples of the current ugly wars these vendors are waging against each other.

AWS is luring away Azure customers. Channel checks suggest that AWS is incentivizing clients to move their Windows workloads to Linux. The next step is to move their SQL Server workloads to other databases (e.g, PostgreSQL). Of course, it won’t stop there; there will be an entire migration strategy in place. And there have even been a few instances in which AWS has funded clients’ early PoCs for this migration along with the implementation partner.

Azure is pushing for AWS migration. It isn’t uncommon for many mid-sized implementation partners to make their client pitch solely on the fact that they can migrate AWS virtual instances to Azure and achieve 20-30 percent, or more, cost savings. It also isn’t uncommon for Microsoft to bundle a lot of its offerings, e.g., Office 365, to create an attractive commercial bundling for its broader cloud portfolio against AWS, which lacks an enterprise applications play.

GCP is pushing Kubernetes cloud and Anthos. GCP’s key argument against AWS and Azure is that they are both “legacy clouds.” The entire Kubernetes cloud platform story is becoming very interesting and relevant for clients. More so, for newer workloads, such as AI, Machine Learning, and Containers, GCP is pushing hard to take the lead.

Each of these vendors will continue to find new avenues to create trouble for each other. Given that Azure and GCP are starting from a low base, AWS has more to lose.

So, how will the cloud war play out? Three things will happen going forward.

Stack lock-in

The vendors have realized that clients can relatively easily move their IaaS, and even PaaS, offerings to another cloud. Therefore, they’ll push to make their clients adopt native platform offerings that cannot be easily ported to different clouds (e.g., serverless). While some of the workloads will be interoperable across other clouds, parts will run only on one cloud vendor’s stack.

Preferred partnership for workloads

While the vendors will acknowledge that implementation partners will always have cloud alliances, they’ll push to have preferred partner status for specific workloads such as database lift and shift, IoT, and AI. For this, most cloud vendors will partner with strategy consulting firms and implementation partners to shape enterprises’ board room agenda.

Migration kits

In 2018, Google acquired cloud migration specialist Velostrata. This year, both AWS and Azure launched migration kits targeting each other’s clients. This battle will soon become even fiercer, and will encompass not only lift and shift VM migration, but also workloads such as database instances, DevOps pipelines, application run time, and even applications.

With the cloud giants at war, enterprises need to be cautious of where to place their bets. They need to realize that working with cloud vendors will become increasingly complex, because it’s not only about the offerings portfolio but also the engagement model.

Here are three things enterprises should focus on:

  • Ensure interoperability and migration: Enterprises need to make the cloud vendors demonstrate evidence of easy workload interoperability with and migration to other cloud platforms. They should also determine the target cloud vendor’s own native migration tool kits and services, regardless of what the selected implementation partner may use.
  • Stress test the TCO model: Enterprises need to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new services offered by the cloud vendors. Most of our clients think the cloud vendors’ “new offerings” are expensive. They believe there’s a lack of translation between the offerings and the TCO model. Enterprises should also stress test the presented cost savings use cases, and ask for strong references.
  • Get the right implementation partner: For simpler engagements, the cloud vendors are increasingly preferring smaller implementation partners as they are more agile. Though the vendors claim their pricing model doesn’t change for different implementation partners, enterprises need to ensure they are getting the best commercial construct from both external parties. For complex transformations, enterprises must do their own evaluation, rather than rely on cloud vendor-attached partners. Doing so will become increasingly important given that most implementation partners work across all the cloud vendors.

The cloud wars have just begun, and will become uglier going forward. The cloud vendors’ deep pockets, technological capabilities, myriad offerings, and sway over the market are making their rivalries different than anything your business has experienced in the past. This time, you need to be better prepared.

What do you think about the cloud wars? Please write to me at [email protected].

Mar 14

How Microsoft Positioned Itself for Hybrid Cloud Leadership | In the News

By | In The News

Microsoft graduated from its rebellious, ’90s, teenage years to become an enterprise leader across some of the hottest computing domains, from software and cloud to analytics and AI.

It was a journey not without bumps, but one that has solidified Microsoft at the top of a market largely dominated by consumer-focused tech companies. Smart is the new sexy, and Microsoft has expertly played the market.

Six years ago, Abhishek Singh, vice president at the Everest Group, would not have expected Microsoft to hold the position of power it does today, he said in an interview with CIO Dive. But the company has pivoted from trying to be a dominant platform player to establishing a presence across platforms, reacting to a cloud market where customers can tap into new sources of storage, compute and platforms.

Read more in CIO Dive

Nov 20

Enterprises Should Jump – Carefully – on the Cloud Native Bandwagon | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

By | Blog, Cloud & Infrastructure, IT Security

With enterprise cloud becoming mainstream, the business case and drivers for adoption have also evolved. The initial phase of adoption focused on operational cost reduction and simplicity – what we call the “Cloud for Efficiency” paradigm. We have now entered Wave 2 of enterprise cloud adoption, where the cloud’s potential to play a critical role in influencing and driving business outcomes is being realized. We call this the “Cloud for Digital” paradigm. Indeed, cloud is now truly the bedrock for digital businesses, as we wrote about earlier.

This is good and powerful news for enterprises. However, to successfully leverage cloud as a business value enabler, the services stack needs to be designed to take advantage of all the inherent benefits “native” to the cloud model – scalability, agility, resilience, and extendibility.

Cloud Native – What Does it Mean Anyway?

Cloud native is not just selective use of cloud infrastructure and platform-based models to reduce costs. Neither is it just about building and deploying applications at pace. And it is definitely not just about adopting new age themes such as PaaS or microservices or serverless. Cloud native includes all of these, and more.

We see cloud native as a philosophy to establish a tightly integrated, scalable, agile, and resilient IT services stack that can:

  • Enable rapid build, iteration, and delivery of, or access to, service features/functionalities based on business dynamics
  • Autonomously and seamlessly adapt to any or all changes in business operation volumes
  • Offer a superior and consistent service experience, irrespective of the point, mode, or scale of services consumption.

Achieving a true cloud native design requires the underlying philosophy to be embedded within the design of both the application and infrastructure stacks. This is key for business value creation, as lack of autonomy and agility within either layer hinders the necessary straight-through processing across the integrated stack.

In this regard, there are salient features that define an ideal cloud native IT stack:

Cloud native applications – key tenets

  • Extendable architecture: Applications should be designed for minimal complexity around adding/modifying features, through build or API connections. While microservices inherently enable this, not all monolithic applications need to be ruled out from becoming components of a cloud native environment
  • Operational awareness and resilience: The application should be designed to track its own health and operational performance, rather than shifting the entire onus on to the infrastructure teams. Fail-safe measures should be built in the applications to maximize service continuity
  • Declarative by design: Applications should be built to trust the resilience of underlying communications and operations, based on declarative programming. This can help simplify applications by leveraging functionalities across different contexts and driving interoperability among applications.

 Cloud native infrastructure – key tenets

  • Services abstraction: Infrastructure services should be delivered via a unified platform that seamlessly pools discrete cloud resources and makes them available through APIs (enabling the same programs to be used in different contexts, and applications to easily consume infrastructure services)
  • Infrastructure as software: IT infrastructure resources should be built, provisioned/deprovisioned, managed, and pooled/scaled based on individual application requirements. This should be completely executed using software with minimal/no human intervention
  • Embedded security as code: Security for infrastructure should be codified to enable autonomous enforcement of policies across individual deploy and run scenarios. Policy changes should be tracked and managed based on version control principles as leveraged in “Infrastructure as Code” designs.

Exponential Value Comes with Increased Complexity

While cloud native has, understandably, garnered significant enterprise interest, the transition to a cloud native model is far from simple. It requires designing and managing complex architectures, and making meaningful upfront investments in people, processes, and technologies/service delivery themes.

Everest Group’s SMART enterprise framework encapsulates the comprehensive and complex set of requirements to enable a cloud native environment in its true sense.

Smart Cloud blog image

Adopting Cloud Native? Think before You Leap

Cloud native environments are inherently complex to design and take time to scale. Consequently, the concept is not (currently) meant for all organizations, functions, or applications. Enterprises need to carefully gauge their readiness through a thorough examination of multiple organizational and technical considerations.

Cloud Key Questions blog image

Our latest report titled Cloud Enablement Services – Market Trends and Services PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2019: An Enterprise Primer for Adopting (or Intelligently Ignoring!) Cloud Native delves further into the cloud native concept. The report also provides the assessment and detailed profiles of the 24 IT service providers featured on Everest Group’s Cloud Enablement Services PEAK MatrixTM.

Feel free to reach out us to explore the cloud native concept further. We will be happy to hear your story, questions, concerns, and successes!