Vlad Postelnicu , Director Alliances and Strategic Partnerships , Middle East and Turkey , Software AG

Enterprises are struggling to digitally transform , migrate to cloud , and build unified data structures , which represents an opportunity for channel partners explains Vlad Postelnicu from Software AG . databases as a service and easy access to huge storages that can be used as data lakes for analytics .

Therefore , proactively , as a company , before diving into a project with any organisation , vendors aim to streamline operations and technical capabilities to meet evolved business requirements through a phased migration of legacy system to the cloud . This is facilitated by a partner ecosystem through different approaches based on customer ’ s preferences as below .

Typically an existing application is picked up and deployed as-is to infrastructure-asa-service , or IaaS in the cloud . There are multiple advantages with this approach – with massive time advantages to move to the cloud and the software will no longer run on a computer in a datacentre that would otherwise need to operate , maintain , backup and upgrade . This as-is , on-premises architecture , however , is not flexible under load nor will it have a built-in high availability . The second path is where a customer chooses to adopt the capabilities provided by a software-as-a-service , or SaaS application . Good examples of this are Salesforce , ServiceNow or Marketo . With a move of a particular business function to a SaaS application , one can switch off or decommission an old application on-premises . The advantages here are that the applications are cloud native , with clear pricing and no operational efforts by the customer .

The third path is where a customer chooses to build brand new cloud-native applications using all the powerful capabilities provided by a platform-as-aservice , PaaS such as the AWS stack or Azure stack . This may allow to wind down obsolete on-premises applications . A key advantage of this approach is the faster time to market , which makes it very suitable for systems of innovation .

Also , by building applications from scratch , customers can leverage the best the cloud providers offer , example

Software AG anticipates that it will take around 15 – 20 years for legacy systems to wean out completely .

Siloed enterprises

Siloes are a heavy burden on enterprise systems . Vendors understand how enterprises work across the globe and

removing departmental silos is presently their main motto to help customers . Vendors have invested in their partner ecosystem in recent years in developing skillsets towards executional excellence not only in using a suite of solutions , but also in architectural and consultant point of view so that partners can guide customers in making right architectural and technical decisions to eliminate departmental siloes .

Therefore , vendors are equipped not only as a technology implementor but also as a consultant through their partner ecosystem throughout the customer journey .

With a quick view at any organisation , the primary area is to understand business requirements to streamline operations and technical capabilities required for such capabilities . The partner ecosystem supports vendor customers to understand their business processes , identify dependencies , find bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement while it also provides insights into a company ’ s operational stage .

These insights enable entities to optimise and stimulate systems and processes in sync with business strategy and objectives . This

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