Modernisation and moving to the cloud

Becoming a ‘digital business’ is an objective many organisations, of all shapes and sizes, have. For some smaller to medium sized businesses the path is a little smoother – thanks to their nimbleness and, typically, their willingness to embrace new technologies. For larger enterprises, modernisation and the path to becoming digitally driven is more of a challenge; often because of investments in legacy technologies which slow the pace of transformation.

Central to becoming a digital business is cloud computing. Indeed research from Gartner projects that the public cloud services market will grow 17.2% in 2016 to total $208.6 billion, up from $178 billion in 2015. Much of this growth will come from software as a service [SaaS], one of the largest segments in the global cloud services market, which is expected to grow 21.7% in 2016 to reach $38.9 billion. According to Gartner, the primary business driver of cloud adoption is the need to modernise IT. One thing is clear – cloud computing will continue to have a considerable impact on business technology in the coming years.

This year SAP has launched a number of cloud-based products and services, as well as new partnerships around cloud. Just this month, SAP announced the launch of SAP BW/4HANA – described as “a next-generation data warehouse application for running a real-time digital enterprise”. A key component of BW/4HANA is cloud, with it soon to be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. According to SAP, this is so that companies can conveniently modernise (there’s that word again) their data warehousing environments.

For SAP users, questions around cloud have often centred on building a convincing business case that justifies cloud migration against existing investments. Here at the User Group, we also understand that cloud migrations can be complex, and we help our members to weigh pros and cons carefully. The only real certainty is that all businesses are different, and that the pace of IT modernisation – whether that includes cloud or not – will depend on a number of individual business circumstances.

To find out more about how the User Group can help your business answer its questions on cloud and IT modernisation, and to stay up to date with developments, get in touch.