Best Practice Guide Cloud computing Do more with your data … · 2019. 8. 13. · the cloud data center being unavailable. But under your SLA with your customer, you may ... can

Best Practice Guide

1 How independent software vendors can quickly migrate customers to the cloud. Version 2.0 © CINTRA 2019www.cintra.com

How independent software vendors can quickly migrate customers to the cloudCloud computing Do more with your dataBest Practice Guide

How independent software vendors can quickly migrate customers to the cloud

Move your customers to state-of-the-art platforms that make their businesses more agile, eliminate capital expenditure and increase your company valuation. This guide explains why and how to make the transition.

Contents

03 Foreword

04 Deliver the benefits of cloud to your existing application users

07 Nine things every ISV needs to know before migrating its existing customers to the cloud

10 How to deliver a cloud pilot of your application for a customer in just 30 days

13 Contact us

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How independent software vendors can quickly migrate customers to the cloudBest Practice Guide

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Cloud computing continues to mature, with organizations large and small across all sectors making use of cloud and enjoying transformational business value.

Foreword

Kamil Guclu, Oracle VP ISV/OEM

Guclu has 15 years of sales experience in international markets and actively took part in creating Oracle’s ISV/OEM go-to-market strategy across EMEA, contributing to the significant growth of the cloud and on-premise business and managing $250M USD of total sales volume.

Before joining Oracle, Guclu worked as the Sales Director for Semper, creating and managing sales and marketing operations of a fast-growing IT startup operating in Turkey and the US.

Cloud computing continues to mature, with organizations large and small across all sectors embracing it and enjoying transformational benefits.

To date, however, cloud services have tended to be used for new application development, with most existing applications being viewed as too costly or complex to move to cloud – or the process of doing so believed to be too challenging or time-consuming.

Many independent software vendors’ (ISVs) applications fall into the second category, given their customers often use them for business-critical purposes. However, by following the right approach, the challenges associated with such a transformative technology transition can be overcome.

And once they are, the benefits – for both the ISVs and their customers – can be significant. They include more attractive pricing models, better use of resources, improved security, higher company valuations and almost limitless room to grow.

This guide looks at the benefits in more detail, then explains how ISVs can go about moving their existing customers to the cloud and start enjoying the benefits in as little as 30 days.

“Benefits for both the ISVs and their customers – can be significant. They include more attractive pricing models, better use of resources, improved security, higher company valuations and almost limitless room to grow”



Deliver the benefits of cloud to your existing application users

Early cloud use has typically been for greenfield development: new systems delivered as part of a digital transformation. But existing applications, particularly those central to the functioning of an organization, are still typically run from a traditional on-premises data room or co-location center. This includes many Oracle-based applications written by independent software vendors (ISVs).

This situation is understandable: when customers rely heavily on your application, a major change to the way you deliver it to them can seem a risky and disruptive strategy.

But at the same time, with your customers starting to see the advantages of cloud in other parts of their businesses, many will be demanding similar benefits from the applications they’ve bought from you. And this means migrating them to a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model using the cloud.

The benefits of moving to the cloud

Moving your existing customers’ applications to the cloud will enable you and them to enjoy the well-understood benefits of using cloud infrastructure.

For your customers, this includes:

• Scalability and flexibility: Near-infinite room to grow their application as demands increase, or decrease capacity at quiet times

• Business agility and responsivness: They can quickly try out new capabilities around your application, thanks to the speed at which you can add capacity to the cloud environments

• More attractive pricing models: By eliminating the need to purchase infrastructure to run your application, you can move your customers onto more attractive operational-expenditure-based pricing models, with low up-front costs and the ability to flex in response to changing demand

• Minimize inefficiency: Much on-premises hardware is under-used, particularly in test and development environments, where utilization is sometimes less than 10%1 . Cloud helps minimize this inefficiency, meaning your customers will only be paying for infrastructure they’re actually using

• Data center reductions: Migrating existing customers’ applications to the cloud can enable them to reduce their data center footprint and cost

• Reduce the cost of infrastructure management: Moving your customers to a SaaS-based model should reduce the amount of infrastructure their technology teams need to look after, meaning they can redeploy resources onto higher-value work

• Improve physical security: Cloud data centers are incredibly secure, typically more so than an on-premises data room

Why now is the time to migrate your existing customer base to the cloud

1 http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/application-development-cloud-1945542.pdf

Abdul Shiekh, CTO and President Cintra Corporation

With over 30 years of Oracle industry experience, including roles at the European Space Agency and Oracle Corporation, Abdul is the technical force behind Cintra’s successful delivery of optimized technology architectures that support the foundation its customers’ modernization strategies

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“We’ve helped ISVs move existing customer implementations to the cloud and achieve significant savings and lower total cost of ownership. ”


Why the Oracle Cloud is best for Oracle-based apps

While any organization’s overall enterprise cloud strategy should make use of a range of cloud providers, when it comes to applications built on Oracle, we’ve found that Oracle Cloud is almost always the best solution.

This is because it provides a range of benefits, including:

• Enterprise-grade technology: Oracle offers various flavours of Infrastructure as a Service, including bare metal provisioning, dedicated compute and regular compute. Moreover, unlike some cloud providers, Oracle gives you access to the underlying infrastructure in both dedicated and multi-tenanted environments, even for Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. This gives you a huge amount of flexibility and enables you to implement appropriate foundations for your customers’ specific needs

• Performance: Choose an appropriate level of cloud performance for your application, from standard compute to high-end Exadata machines

• Ease of migration: There’s no need to significantly re-architect your Oracle-based application or its platform when you migrate it to the Oracle cloud. This is because Oracle’s cloud is specifically engineered to work with Oracle databases. If you choose a different cloud provider for your Oracle-based application, it could require major re-architecting increasing risk and costs

• Security: You can implement your customers’ enterprise-grade security in the same way they do on-premises, thanks to the ability to access the underlying infrastructure

• Scalability: Oracle Cloud can scale vertically and horizontally to support large enterprise-grade workloads

• Ease of management: Your Oracle Cloud estate can be managed using the same Oracle enterprise tooling you’ll already be familiar with from Oracle Database

Why now is the time to embrace cloud

As the data center equipment that underpins your customers’ applications reaches end-of-life, they’ll be looking for an alternative to the major capital expenditure of buying new hardware. By migrating their instance of your application to the Oracle Cloud, this is exactly what you’ll provide.

Oracle’s cloud offering has matured significantly in the past few years and now has a data center footprint covering the whole globe.

We’ve helped ISVs move existing customer implementations to the cloud and achieve significant savings and lower total cost of ownership. For your customers, this can free up resources to spend on innovation and other products and services from your business.

For you as the ISV, the savings can be reinvested in intellectual property and to accelerate cloud adoption and wider business growth. All of this can help boost your EBITDA, company share price and valuation.

Perhaps most crucially of all, as we touched on above, cloud adoption by ISVs is still in its infancy, which means that embracing it now can give you and your customers a distinct competitive advantage.

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Before your start your cloud journey

The benefits are tantalizingly close, but given the risks involved in radically changing the way your customers use your software, you as the ISV need to plan the process carefully.

In our next piece, we’ll reveal nine things you need to address before you embark on the journey to move your existing customer base to the cloud.


“Cloud adoption by ISVs is still in its infancy, which means that embracing it now can give you and your customers a distinct competitive advantage.”

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Nine things every ISV needs to know before migrating its existing customers to the cloud

Oracle Cloud is engineered to work with your Oracle-based application, but how do you ensure you deliver the performance, availability and security your customers require? Here are nine things you need to consider as you plan the move.

Organizations across all sectors are gradually delivering more services through the cloud, to enjoy all the benefits this can bring. Independent software vendors’ (ISV) customers are no different. With many already experiencing the benefits of cloud in other areas of their operations, they’re now looking to do the same around the often mission-critical applications they buy from ISVs.

There are several credible enterprise cloud providers, and smart ISVs are adopting multi-vendor cloud strategies, selecting the best cloud for specific purposes. For your Oracle-based applications and their databases, Oracle’s cloud is nearly always best in terms of performance, cost-effectiveness and ease of migration. This is because all parts of the Oracle technology stack come from the same vendor and are engineered to work together. We’ll therefore focus on migrating your Oracle-based applications to the Oracle Cloud for the remainder of this guide.

Why you need to get it right first time

When you’re migrating an important or even critical part of your customers’ operations to the cloud, you need to get it right first time. The potential financial and reputational damage to your business (and potentially your customers’) if you don’t is unthinkable. To help you achieve success, here are nine things to consider as you plan the move.

1. Choose the right flavour of Oracle Cloud

You’ve got several options when it comes to migrating your application to Oracle Cloud, and it’s important you choose the right one if it’s to perform well.

For most workloads, the standard Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering will suffice, though you need to select the appropriate version:

• Bare metal server: This provides access to a server, giving you ultimate flexibility, including the ability to use your own hypervisor

• Dedicated compute: This includes a server with a hypervisor and guest operating system. All of this will be for your sole use, and you get full access to the guest OS

• General compute: This includes a server with a hypervisor and guest operating system on shared infrastructure. Again, you get full access to the guest OS

If you need high performance, perhaps for tier-one database workloads, consider the cloud options that use Engineered Systems. There’s also the storage-only option, if your customer just wants to use the cloud for application backups.

Lastly, if you or your customer are concerned about security or must guarantee the geographical location of data, there’s the Oracle Cloud Machine. This appliance sits in your customer’s data center and is priced on a consumption (pay-for-what-you-use) basis. This provides dedicated infrastructure and many of the benefits of cloud, inside their own firewall. They will, however, still need to pay the data center costs. This approach can be a game-changer for customers in highly regulated sectors.




2. Make sure you can offer attractive SLAs (and deliver on them)

Switching your customers to a Software as a Service (SaaS)-based approach will almost certainly mean you have to provide a guarantee around availability levels. And this can be challenging, because Oracle Cloud (like other cloud vendors) only offers a so-called ‘Service Level Objective’. This is less stringent than a formal Service Level Agreement (SLA), and gives you as the ISV no recourse to Oracle if your application becomes unavailable as a result of the cloud data center being unavailable. But under your SLA with your customer, you may still have to pay a service credit.

Linked to this is another issue: in a customer’s own data center or data room, they (or you) have complete control of when maintenance windows are scheduled. In the cloud, however, these timings will be determined by your provider. What if your customer needs your application available during these scheduled downtime windows?

Both these issues demonstrate the need for you as the ISV to architect your customers’ cloud platforms in a way that enables you to confidently deliver the availability they require, and back this up with an SLA you know you can achieve.

3. Don’t assume you can keep the same architecture

The previous point outlines one of the reasons why replicating your customers’ on-premises architectures in the cloud may not be the best approach. There are others besides. They all boil down to the fact that

keeping the same architecture could hamper your ability to deliver your customer the promised benefits of cloud.

Assess how you can optimize the application’s environment for cloud by resizing, reconfiguring or re-architecting it.

4. What’s your application connected to?

Enterprise-scale applications are almost always connected to a wider ecosystem of databases, services and other applications. Before you move your application to the cloud, you need to understand what impact this will have on your customer’s other applications or processes that rely on it or its data.

Take these additional requirements into account when you design the cloud architecture for your customer, and look at where you may need to reconfigure other applications and services to enable them to continue to link seamlessly with yours.

5. How will you deliver performance?

Think about the performance impact of moving data between the cloud, your customer’s on-premises architecture and its end users. Particularly where large volumes of information are involved, you’ll need to plan for how to deliver the performance your customers (and theirs) require.

What steps can you take to reduce the amount of data that has to be moved between the cloud and on-premises, for example? Or could you co-locate related on-premises infrastructure in a data center closer to the cloud to minimize latency?

6. What about security?

Security needs to be a central part of your plans from the word go. Involve your own and each customer’s information security teams to ensure you implement (and can document) appropriate measures. Make sure you can deploy their existing enterprise security tooling into the cloud environment, and apply the same level of rigour you would with an on-premises implementation.

On a more granular level, make sure you define the security requirements per application and per dataset, ideally on a tiered basis. This will help you and your customers decide what data can reside in the cloud and what can’t.


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7. Licensing

In the Oracle world, the cost and complexity of licensing means it always requires close attention. However, as an ISV, there are options for you to move to simpler licensing models, which help free up funds to invest in cloud transitions.

For your customers, running your application from the cloud can help reduce their license requirements and enable them to run a leaner, more economically sustainable estate.

8. Role changes

Moving to the cloud could mean role changes in your ISV business. Your responsibility will now extend beyond the application itself, so you’ll need someone to oversee and be accountable for the cloud infrastructure it’s running on. The strategic importance of this means it will typically involve a director, VP or C-level appointment.

For your customers, moving your application to the cloud should mean they have a smaller on-premises estate to manage. Consequently, they may be able to free up resources from administration to focus on higher-value work, such as innovation and new product and service development.

9. Plan the migration

Lastly, you need a proven, repeatable plan for how you’ll architect and build each customer cloud environment, integrate it with other systems, migrate to it and then operate it sustainably.

This is critical for two reasons. Firstly, because you need to deliver success on time, every time, so can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Secondly, because you’ll be delivering a lot of these transitions, you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel every time when it comes to the process you follow.

Conclusion

When you’re looking to move critical parts of your customers’ operations to the cloud, you need to get it right first time. By planning carefully and keeping these nine key things in mind throughout, you’ll be in the strongest possible position to deliver the benefits of cloud to your customers and your own business.

In our final piece, we’ll outline a proven process of migrating an application to Oracle Cloud, and demonstrate how you can deploy your first customer pilot in as little as 30 days and full production operation in just 90 days.

“By planning carefully and keeping these nine key things in mind throughout, you’ll be in the strongest possible position to deliver the benefits of cloud to your customers and your own business.”

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How to deliver a cloud pilot of your application for a customer in just 30

By using proven designs and following established processes, independent software vendors can transition their customers to the cloud quickly and assuredly.

Many independent software vendors’ (ISVs) applications perform critical roles within their customers’ organizations. We’ve previously discussed why moving these customers to the cloud can be beneficial, and highlighted key things you as the ISV need to consider if your customers’ cloud moves are to be successful.

While shifting what’s likely to be an important part of any customer’s operations to the cloud may seem like a time-consuming and disruptive undertaking, this needn’t be the case. By following proven processes built on best practices and lessons learned on large numbers of similar migrations, you might be surprised at how quickly you can transition a customer from an on-premises-based architecture to one using Oracle Cloud.

A pilot can be delivered in as little as 30 days, while a full production system can be done in just 90.

Where to begin

Start with a customer where the need is greatest: perhaps they’re facing infrastructure-related performance issues that could be addressed by moving to cloud, or maybe their on-premises hardware is approaching end-of-life and they’re contemplating what to do next.



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A cloud pilot in 30 days: How to do it

To deliver a working pilot in 30 days, start by understanding your customer’s implementation of your application, both from a functional and technical perspective. What is it running on now? Are there any issues that need addressing before or during the move to cloud?

With these insights, design an appropriate cloud platform for the customer. If, like many ISVs, you have different sizes of customer implementation, it’s advisable to create a set of re-usable cloud reference designs for small, medium and large implementations. This is something Cintra has done for a number of ISVs, and it considerably accelerates and de-risks the process.

Once the design is complete, you can provision the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments you need, then migrate your application and its associated Oracle database(s) to it. As part of the migration, ensure all the integrations between your application and your customer’s other systems remain intact.

Following the 30-day pilot

Once your customer’s cloud pilot is running, you’ll start to be able to demonstrate to them (and potentially other customers and prospects) the benefits of delivering it in this way. Assess how it’s running and make any refinements to the application, its underlying platform and any associated systems in their business to improve matters.

Once you have a solution you and your customer are happy with, it’s time to prepare it for production use. Oracle’s cloud offers a ready-made production-hardening toolset that integrates with enterprise tooling, making it easier and faster to get your pilot production-ready than it would be with most other cloud platforms.

Build out your cloud strategy and plans

In parallel with this, take the lessons learned and start planning the subsequent steps of your customer cloud journey. Decide which customers should be next to make the transition, again focusing where the benefits are high and tangible, the migration complexity is manageable and risks are low.

Keeping your cloud performing

Just as it is with on-premises Oracle application technology, you need to keep your customers’ cloud platforms lean and well-maintained. This will ensure they (and you) continue to enjoy the benefits, particularly around cost-effectiveness.

Do all of this, and you’ll be on the path to success. You’ll be able to deliver your customers the Software-as-a-Service-based pricing they want, alongside genuine agility, flexibility and scalability around your application.

And for your business, transitioning customers to the cloud will help you accelerate your growth, invest in intellectual property, increase profits and boost your overall company share price and valuation.

How to deliver a cloud pilot of your application for a customer in just 30

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Best Practice Guide

Your pathway to successCintra is a multi-award winning Global Oracle Platinum partner and Enterprise Architecture specialist operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Cintra focuses on enterprises undergoing digital transformation strategies in Retail, Financial Services, Gaming and other verticals; becoming a trusted partner for organizations investing in Oracle Business Technology – delivering value by helping architect the digital enterprise.

www.cintra.com



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Best Practice Guide Cloud computing Do more with your data … · 2019. 8. 13. · the cloud data center being unavailable. But under your SLA with your customer, you may ... can