Transcript and slide deck
Kieran Fizgerald
Hello everyone, my name is Kieran Fitzgerald from Centiq, I'm the Chief Sales Officer. I've been with the business for 11 years and most recently we've just been acquired by SoftwareONE and joined their group in the UK.
We're an organisation that has lived in the SAP cloud space for the last few years, working with a number of organisations across multiple different industries on their journey to the cloud. We've been running this series that looks at and explores how an agile enterprise is able to take advantage of clouds to deliver better value for their organisation and for their internal stakeholders. And the theme that we see across those agile enterprises are organisations that are able to take advantage of a flexible and scalable and agile infrastructure. And we've run a session around how to take the costs out of the clouds and to enable that agility.
Today we're talking about how organisations can actually free up their internal resource to take advantage of this newly found and flexible and agile cloud platform to actually then deliver better value for their business. And we're running another session on what they do and how they spend their time doing that.
So what's available in terms of the innovation in the cloud. There's separate sessions on that for you to watch as you wish. As I said, today's focused on how to save time and free up IT team resources as part of that journey to the cloud. So I'm just going to share my screen and talk through a couple of slides.
In the context of an SAP and the clouds and the IT teams associated with trying to manage and run these platforms, we've talked a lot in the other sessions about the complexity, typically in this space and some of the best practises required to simplify that as part of the migration to the clouds.
But what organisations are trying to do really is provide a level of availability and performance and security within the budget that's available to them. And they're trying to respond to increasing demands from the business around compliance.
They're trying to provide support 24/7. Most businesses are becoming increasingly 24/7 organisations. And they're trying to manage an increasingly complex portfolio of software licences as more and more software tools and technologies are leveraged in the business.
But what prevents them from achieving all of those goals and I won't read through all of these, I'll just reinforce a couple of points. Particularly the ones at the top, is around the speed and unreliability of some of those systems and the technical depth associated.
It's compounded by the usual complexity of an STP landscape. And what we want is organisations as part of that migration to the cloud, to standardise, to modernise, to rationalise, and to automate that platform, to remove that complexity.
And that's a just, it's a perfect inflexion point to establish new ways of working, but it doesn't solve all the problems. The team still then need to manage multiple suppliers and work with a number of different partners. There's a lot of risk associated with doing anything in the enterprise space around a core ERE system in terms of the technical risks, the impact of the business on a commercial level as well. And they're the key things that stop customers from achieving the level of availability, performance, security at the right cost that we've highlighted previously.
Modern managed services for the cloud are really, really important. We talked in one of the other sessions around mistake number one, highlighted by Gartner around cloud migrations is the choice of the right migration partner. And that's not just the move that's also the run, you move to the cloud largely to be a more agile and flexible organisation which means you want to embrace change.
So actually the journey only starts when you are live in the clouds and that change starts to and should increase. So as I mentioned, our four pillars around standardisation, rationalisation, modernization and automation, a modern managed service for the cloud should be take advantage of all four of those pillars and should add a huge amount of value to an organisation. It should give a business and an IT team access to real specialist domain experts across a range of technical or business environments.
And what we're talking about here in the SAP space is understanding a number of the key technologies. So a typical SAP system will be running obviously, the STP application running potentially on the HANA database, which runs on Linux operating systems, which runs on Azure.
So you've got four potentially very new technologies for an organisation to manage and actually what you want to be doing is working with an organisation that's integrated all those skills, and you are working with an organisation that understands what SAP HANA on Linux, on Azure is rather than multiple different domain experts that know a little bit about each technology.
We're able to provide 24/7 operations to provide support around the clock for those businesses and their internal IT teams and to provide insights. So not just providing the support and taking away the pain, which will come on too shortly, but actually providing that insight into best practise and evolving technologies.
As I said, the journey starts with cloud. Once you move there and new functionalities, new opportunities emerge all the time with the clouds. It's one of the biggest reasons to move, but that means you have to be able to take advantage of it and work with an organisation that can help you make sense of it all, I guess. And you want that flexibility to be able to respond to changes in your internal demands, your cost to demands and all of that is enabled through a technical support service.
In terms of the pains that can be removed, we can ensure that all systems remain secure and are maintained to the highest degree of standards. Given some of the requirements around compliance, this is a really, really important topic. That level of performance and availability we described before can be improved.
So if an organisation is running high availability, which typically in an STP, the ecosystem is quite prominent due to the criticality of the application to the business and the processes that it supports.
Being able to actually test that and prove that availability is there when it's required is, is really important. And we were presenting at the SAP user group in November with one of our customers who actually was talking about the fact that when they were in Azure, the system failed over to HA and the business didn't even realise, and that's what should happen. And they knew that it would happen because they tested it before and all this stuff is really, really important to giving a business confidence in the technical service being there to support all the extra change they're trying to drive.
We take the risk out of running these systems, which we highlighted before as being quite rife in this space and additional value in looking at the future migrations of any additional work that comes in terms of minimising the business impact through the reducing downtime and making sure that everything's ready to change when you move.
And the last two points you want to reinforce are really the theme of this particular webinar. And it's that by working with a managed service provider who can give you all of this greatness that frees up your internal IT resources to do the things that really matter.
So running projects and working with the business to actually create value rather than fixing problems and building those long term technical capabilities in-house to support that strategy that that organisation has. Every organisation is different and the internal IT teams know their business and are much closer to the business than an outsourced IT service provider. And you know that business so you can work with that business to support whatever strategies and initiatives they're working on.
I guess the final point to call out is that all of this enables that organisation to then further take advantage of the clouds by being there to support the business, cloud has driven the IT business functions closer together than ever and a modern managed service frees at that resource to go and support that team and take advantage of clouds and ensure that the technical depth remains low once you move to the clouds and it's constantly in a perpetual state of readiness for change.
So that's it for this session, hopefully that's been useful. There are other sessions around cost optimization kind of what we do when we're there as well and some of the initiative that some of these teams are on, particularly in the data space, once you're in cloud. So hopefully you enjoy their sessions as much as you've enjoyed this one. Thank you for your time.
