Every client is at some point in the road some on their cloud journey.

June 19, 2017

3 Min Read
Big Data in the Cloud

Peterson-Jo_Clarify360-150x150.jpg

Jo Peterson

By Jo Peterson

A recent article in CIO magazine stated that public, private and hybrid cloud implementations will accelerate in 2017 as CIOs seek to take advantage of the cloud’s economies of scale to build core applications.

Every one of our clients is at some point in the road some on their cloud journey. Some of the clients we have are taking the larger next step. They are moving core business applications to the cloud. It seems as if we’ve entered a second phase in the cloud-services journey.

Many of us have either had or are having conversations today with clients around moving systems of organizational productivity such as email, desktop, and voice services. Often we’ve been able to present compelling offerings around DR as a service as well. But what’s next?

Glad you asked. There are a number of application cloud products which help to run a business such as SAP S/4HANA and Microsoft Dynamics AX. Gartner terms these services Single Instance ERP solutions.

So what exactly is SAP S/4HANA? It’s enterprise resource planning software which covers all day to day processes of an enterprise. The product streamlines transactions, analytics and data processing on a single, in-memory database.

Good news: The demand for Single Instance ERP solutions is growing. According to an article in Diginomica, S/4HANA adoption doubled year over year to more than 5,400 customers. In the fourth quarter of 2016, approximately 1,300 additional customers signed up — of which approximately 30 percent are net-new SAP customers.

Other conversations to be had include BI as a service and security as a service. Demand for these products is on the rise as well.

Join us for a discussion on selling enterprise application-based cloud services such as SAP HANA and Oracle, the systems businesses rely on to run their mission critical data services. We’ll also discuss other products found further up the stack – like BI and security-as-a-service – that are lucrative for you and invaluable to customers. It’s happening Sept. 26 at Channel Partners Evolution. Register now!

According to MarketsandMarkets, the managed security service (security as a service) market size is estimated to grow from $17.02 billion in 2016 to $33.68 billion by 2021. This is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.6 percent. Products in this category include firewall (IDS/IPS), vulnerability managements, UTM, DDoS,, compliance management, SIEM, antivirus/antimalware and others.

Markets and Markets also reports that the big-data-as-a-service market will be worth $7 billion by 2020. Products in this category Include Hadoop as a service, data as a service and data analytics as a service.

So why are customers moving to these solutions? For the same reasons that they moved other services to the cloud.

In the case of S/4HANA, customers find that they can do the following:

  • Achieve faster time to value — provision infrastructure for SAP HANA in hours vs. weeks to months.

  • Scale infrastructure resources.

  • Reduce cost by paying for only the infrastructure resources that you need and use.

  • Bring their own licenses — leverage existing licensing investment with no additional licensing fees.

  • Achieve a higher level of availability — ability to build in DR. Even better news for us as partners is that many of our current providers that we sell services through today offer these products and services. Chances are strong that we haven’t been asking about them!

  • These complex solutions are important to our clients and lucrative to sell.

  • Forrester estimates that SAP HANA can save an organization 37 percent across hardware, software and labor costs, depending on various factors.

Jo Peterson is the vice president of cloud services for Clarify360, a boutique sourcing and benchmarking consultancy focused on cloud, colocation and connectivity. Prior to joining Clarify360 in 2011 and helping to create their brand portfolio, Peterson spend more than 20 years in the technology field in both presales and selling roles. A founding co-chair of CloudGirls, Peterson currently serves on the Channel Partners Editorial Advisory Board and the Rackspace Partner Advisory Council.

Read more about:

Agents
Free Newsletters for the Channel
Register for Your Free Newsletter Now

You May Also Like