Despite the increasingly compelling arguments in favor of cloud computing, including the unbeatable combination of greater flexibility at lower costs, many companies have yet to commit to moving their operations to the cloud.
One of the main reasons for doubt, according to Steve McMillan, senior vice president of Managed Cloud Services at Oracle, is that companies "have made significant investments in local applications that have not yet reached their full potential for return on investment."
Another reason, McMillan explains, is the perceived cost of the changes required to move from one platform to another. Of course, the size of the changes can vary widely, from “the direct cost of buying the new platform - and the time it takes to migrate to the new platform - to the double-bubble effect of running new and old platforms at the same time. McMillan says.
To minimize the cost of change while controlling scope, McMillan suggests three strategies companies can use to gradually migrate to the cloud.
1. Move an entire business unit or business function to Software as a Service (SaaS).
In this scenario, companies can use SaaS applications to move their finance, sales or services functions to the cloud without affecting an existing on-premises application infrastructure, without investing in new hardware or adding a data center and staff to manage it.
For industrial equipment maker Toshiba Mitsubishi Electric Industrial Systems Corporation (TMEIC), the industry's SaaS approach was very straightforward.
In 2008 TMEIC had an internal CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. However, the company found that over time the application could not deliver the types of business intelligence and mobile connectivity that the growing global sales force needed.
"No one is sitting in an office talking to customers anymore," says John Slaski, IT director at TMEIC. "We are all in the field and we take care of them."
With offices on every continent except Antarctica, TMEIC's field is huge. "Our employees need to be mobile and connected to the office again," says Slaski.
TMEIC went online with Oracle Sales Cloud in May 2015.
"We have a collaborative sales model. For example, if we develop an offering for China, we may need to connect with TMEIC teams in other regions of Asia, Europe and the United States," says Slaski.
Using the analytics dashboards built into Oracle Sales Cloud, TMEIC executives can monitor each business unit to see exactly where most of the business is being done, what the geographic close rates are, and what sales methods and tracking teams are. they are generating more income.
2. Transition of part of the functionality through Platform as a Service (PaaS).
With this approach, companies can easily divide a number of functions in their local Human Capital Management (HCM), Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) or CRM system and then move them to a cloud environment where data can be shared. managed and analyzed by each authorized user.
Aeroméxico, the Mexico City-based airline, took a "cloud split" approach after making significant investments in Oracle's local ERP applications in 2014. With the managed cloud service Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, The company began analyzing passenger profile and travel history data from multiple local ERP applications and sophisticated financial models with a combination of variables such as travel frequencies, ticket prices, fuel costs, exchange rates, and Execute. types of aircraft to determine which passengers, routes and services will be used achieved the highest profit margins.
3. Use infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for development and testing.
This approach not only helps companies minimize hardware and network costs by paying only for what is actually used, but also provides a flexible application testing environment that allows developers to innovate without leaving other parts of the business disruption.
TMEIC is currently developing a proof-of-concept DevTest environment to move all of its applications to a public cloud. The company is experimenting with Oracle's IaaS solutions to rapidly launch new application development instances without compromising similar instances that are already in production.
For example: "We have teams working on applications for newly entered markets like Singapore and Vietnam, which have very different tax regulations and require a lot of region-specific adjustments.
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