Leveraging Cloud for revenue and customer satisfaction
- 13 November, 2015 08:33
The nature of Cloud has caused a fundamental shift in the way companies deploy new applications. Organisations no longer have to build new deployments in house and then face an uphill battle in deploying them on other platforms. It is now possible to develop on one platform and deploy to multiple environments without the need to reverse engineer applications.
Gartner senior vice-president and global head of research, Peter Sondergaard, said for digital businesses to succeed, companies are creating new innovation units.
“New digital initiatives are running alongside their traditional analogue businesses. The business itself is bimodal,” he said.
“Organisations are creating separate business units, focusing on digital, separate from their traditional businesses. They are trying new ways of reaching the customer, of running operations, of driving diverse innovation. They are acquiring and investing in digital technology companies, not waiting on existing suppliers to build capabilities because they have to start in a different place.”
SAP A/NZ general manager platform solutions, Paul Muller, explained that deploying as-a-service offerings to the market allows channel partners to develop revenue streams across infrastructure, software and services.
“The ideal scenario is to build a solution once, then deploy it to many customers. This provides economies of scale in the total cost of developing and managing such solutions. In essence, partners deploying PaaS solutions have the ability to solve many business problems with the one platform and derive many services around those offerings.”
Further, the public/private Cloud debate is soon to be behind us. The rise of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has led to companies deploying applications based upon what works and not where it will work.
Hitachi Data Systems technology evangelist, Greg Knieriemen, said, “When you look at PaaS, it will abstract because you are just going to the Cloud and then your policies and the automation decide where that physically lives. We are not going to be fighting about private or public, it’s all going to be just Cloud.”
“Data is inherently dumb,” Sondergaard added. “It doesn’t actually do anything unless you know how to use it; how to act with it. Algorithms are where the real value lies. Algorithms define action. Dynamic algorithms are the core of new customer interactions.”
In light of this trend, channel partners are now able to deploy not individual Clouds that companies have to work around, they are able to deploy platforms for customers to innovate, develop and deploy on through a single arena.
In such an instance, the partner provides customers a platform for development they are comfortable with and a solution the partner can quickly and easily add value to with additional services such as analytics and data management tools.
As such, while customers seek to develop applications and algorithms to deal with data, they need a platform that can ensure the solutions are easily adaptable to whatever purpose is needed.
This is where channel partners can add value. By deploying a platform for development such as SAP HANA Cloud Platform, partners will ensure that they improve customer productivity and attain that ever-elusive customer stickiness.
SAP will be hosting its A/NZ Architect developer summit on 23-24 November. Click here to find out more.
