Today, multicloud is the new reality – and it will be so tomorrow. We don’t believe it’s true that all organisations are on a journey to deploy workloads to a single hyperscaler – and the research supports that view.

As many as 76% of cloud buyers now use multiple cloud providers. More than half of organisations are planning hybrid cloud deployments between private and public cloud; 48% plan to increase their cloud spending; and 66% want to improve their cloud security this year.

Ěýis the cloud market from now on. But your journey isn’t likely to be linear. To set yourself up for success, expect a continuous cycle of transformation and optimisation, delivering incremental improvements and increased value with each step.

Most organisations understand they must overcome some challenges in adopting cloud, and those challenges are multiplied with multiple clouds.

This is never simple, whether it’s managing multiple cloud partners; creating secure, consistent environments across managed public cloud, on-premises andĚý; or juggling the needs of traditional and cloud-native applications.

Along with increased complexity comes increased cyber crime vulnerability. Your business growth can also slow down to a snail’s pace when governance, risk and compliance measures become increasingly onerous. Given that most cloud vendors are seeking some form of lock-in agreement, managing multicloud landscapes can be costly, too. Even getting visibility of your entire estate doesn’t come cheap.

Add to this the upskilling of your organisation to manage two of the major public-cloud operators and a private cloud, for example, and suddenly your investment in people, processes and certifications becomes massive. It’s no mystery why as many as 70% of businesses rely onĚýĚýlike us to help them keep things simpler.

Lawter is a Belgian chemicals manufacturer and a longstanding client of ours. Initially, they moved to us from an incumbent supplier to manage their Â鶹ԭ´´ estate on top of a private cloud. We’re now moving those same workloads from private cloud onto Azure, all while delivering a consistent managed service for their Â鶹ԭ´´ Basis environment. We’re giving them full flexibility to choose the flavour of multicloud they need, but with the consistency and simplicity of our managed services.

All cloud challenges are hard to solve without skilled employees. And unless you have an enormous IT budget, you’re unlikely to have a deep bench. All of this slows your pace of innovation because your staff is focused elsewhere. Getting new services to market requires fast development – which is one of the reasons why cloud spending is no longer just the domain of the CIO. It’s not only about cost savings for the lines of business, but also about using cloud services to invest and innovate.

Another of our clients, Henkel, a chemicals manufacturer, was driven by the need to simplify a complex environment of multiple hybrid and on-premises contact centres into a single, cloud-based solution. Following our successfully orchestrated, remote migration during COVID-19, the cloud-based contact centre solution now gives them the flexibility to effectively manage their costs while introducing digital channels and operational enhancements that their customers and service teams were awaiting.

Multicloud as a service is about realising the art of the possible. Because you often use more than one cloud provider, it should make it simpler to manage complexity. But it should also give you cloud multi-vision so you can have your eyes and ears everywhere across your IT estate in an instant, combined with the intelligence and insight that modern technologies like AI and predictive analytics deliver to put you in control.

And when it comes to innovation, you’ll want to take the brakes off, which means you need to optimise your application workloads through application modernisation and hosting initiatives aimed at freeing up your employees. With multicloud, innovation is well within your reach.

The post The Future is Multicloud, That Future is Now appeared first on Â鶹ԭ´´ Africa News Center.

Throw skills shortages into the mix and it’s clear that waiting any longer to make decisions is an extremely high-risk strategy.

The hesitation of Â鶹ԭ´´ decision-makers suggests that the potential gains on offer from migration are not yet clear enough. Fujitsu’s key idea here is that application modernization must add something extra.

Creating new business value – we could also call it business transformation – requires something more. If all you do is modernize, it’s the equivalent of maintenance.

This article covers two examples of strategic benefits available from S/4HANA migration to create new business value – composable ERP and cloud migration/hybrid IT. And I’ll look at new services now available from Fujitsu to extract those benefits reliably and quickly.

Composable ERP

One strategic benefit from migration is the ability to connect your business to be more adaptable and do new things. Analyst firm Gartner recognizes that many manufacturers now have multiple systems of record in play – Â鶹ԭ´´, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, AWS, and Microsoft.

It coined the term “Composable ERP” to describe and advocate this trend. Composable ERP is a strategy where we leverage the right components to build value, mixing and matching between vendors. In other words, ERP is no longer a monolithic thing – as in “I’m all in Â鶹ԭ´´â€ť or “We’re an Oracle shop”.

You get fully connected, real-time data to provide a complete view of your business across upstream and downstream supply chains. S/4HANA migration offers the perfect time for assessing and addressing how data infrastructure can be modernized to create this kind of “Control Tower” environment.

Cloud migration and hybrid cloud

One factor that makes S/4HANA more connectable is that it is the first version of the ERP to be truly cloud-native. This characteristic opens all the benefits of cloud migration and the ultimate flexibility of Â鶹ԭ´´ workload placement.

It is therefore vital that your S/4HANA migration enables your organization to achieve all the strategic benefits of the hybrid cloud environments.

However, workloads in hybrid environments are incredibly complex. Workload demand can be across a wide range of environments, including multiple on-premises locations, plus cloud partners such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform and their respective regional nodes.

Optimizing your Â鶹ԭ´´ infrastructure to operate successfully in these environments requires a high degree of understanding about what is happening where and — just as important — what might happen under specific scenarios.

To assist here, Fujitsu now offers a new Hybrid Cloud Assessment Service for Â鶹ԭ´´ Solutions that analyzes millions of possible placement options based on measured workloads. Fujitsu BestPlace provides a unique data-driven approach.

It encodes the measured Â鶹ԭ´´ IT as DNA and simulates a mini evolution using genetic algorithms. Following the principle of the survival of the fittest, the process results in an optimal design for a hybrid infrastructure.

This is an individualized approach that addresses the specific needs of each customer rather than a generic model that is unlikely to meet all the needs of all users.

It measures Â鶹ԭ´´ operations onsite for about four weeks, compares all the different placement options against the customer’s IT strategy and business priorities and provides cost comparison for all measured Â鶹ԭ´´ instance workloads in the cloud or on-premises. The algorithm is developed by an external university to ensure neutral results.

Get to value faster with rightsizing

An effective ERP should enable organizations to access rapid insights, make quick decisions, and extract the value from a change of direction as quickly as possible. However, typical user complaints are “my Â鶹ԭ´´ is too slow” and “Â鶹ԭ´´ is hanging again”.

To address this, as well as optimize workload placements, it is also vital to assess infrastructure sizing, deployment, and maintenance. Â鶹ԭ´´ performance and service-level issues can have multiple root causes and finding the optimal configuration has always been extremely difficult.

Therefore, one common approach to forcing a solution is with brute force: buying and installing more infrastructure, regardless of whether it addresses the actual cause. That’s an expensive way of solving the problem.

Enterprises that migrate now can benefit from rightsizing their Â鶹ԭ´´ implementations. Unlike standard Â鶹ԭ´´ tools, based on reference architectures,ĚýĚý(SIS) uses real-life data from your landscape, creating data-driven decision support for any migration or hardware refresh.

This analysis and consultation package gets to grips with all these parameters, avoiding overspend later.

SIS gives clear recommendations for improving on-premises or cloud IT for Â鶹ԭ´´ landscapes by identifying bottlenecks, performance anomalies, and realistic capacity requirements.

By rightsizing the new S/4HANA for on-premises, it narrows the gap between on-premises and cloud in terms of costs, as you don’t need to buy so much excess capacity that mainly sits idle.

Infrastructure simplicity

Regarding infrastructure options, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for Â鶹ԭ´´ HANA enables the full potential of Â鶹ԭ´´ HANA in-memory computing. It is a pre-tested infrastructure solution, 100% Â鶹ԭ´´ certified and designed for the Â鶹ԭ´´ HANA in-memory architecture.

It exploits the full capabilities of persistent memory without deployment and configuration risks and simplifies operation and maintenance with one service partner for the entire solution stack.

Yes, Fujitsu can Â鶹ԭ´´

Fujitsu has an extremely robust partnership with Â鶹ԭ´´. We have approximately 8,000 customer installations worldwide. For example, at Fujitsu’s Technical Competence Demo Center in Walldorf, Germany – the home of Â鶹ԭ´´ – customers can optimize their Â鶹ԭ´´ infrastructure investment based on actual use cases.

If you have — and intend to continue to have — an Â鶹ԭ´´ ERP, you need to lock in your migration partner within the next 12 months. Wait too long, and everyone will be chasing a finite pool of resources, removing control of the migration timetable, and resulting in rising prices.

Migration is a fantastic opportunity to create new business value. Fujitsu’s SystemInspection Service for Â鶹ԭ´´, and its Hybrid Cloud Assessments Service enable customers to understand their environments completely, then map their business goals and transformation plans to the optimum architecture and infrastructure solutions.

What better way to experience this than to sign up for a Fujitsu CX Labs sessions.

The post How to Create New Business Value from your Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA Migration appeared first on Â鶹ԭ´´ Africa News Center.

A study by data analytics firm IDC found that spending on public cloud services will nearly triple over the next five years, from R4,29-billion in 2017 to R 11,53-billion in 2022.

We are seeing a phenomenal uptake of public cloud across a spectrum of businesses; from micro organisations that want to back up their data to the cloud in a cost-effective way, to the most complex ones such as financial services organisations that are using Microsoft Azure as the foundation to drive new levels of productivity, create intelligent data-driven experiences and deepen business trust.

Businesses need to be agile, move quickly and respond to market demand. The power of the cloud allows them to drive agility and speed, but it also enables them to be flexible, which is important in these challenging and uncertain times.

Organisations that are scaling back or ramping up their products and services can leverage the power of the cloud and an opex model to respond accordingly.

Those businesses that run an on-premise IT environment are struggling to put in place plans that will allow their employees to work remotely coupled with the necessary business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

However, the reality is that many businesses are going to be in a hybrid state for some time as their IT environments are evolving and becoming increasingly complex.

ĚýManaging a hybrid state and the edge

Applications are running on different hardware across on-premise datacentres, multiple clouds and the edge.

Exxaro Resources, one of South Africa’s largest heavy minerals mining companies, moved its headquarters to a new green building and migrated its on-premise datacentre to Azure, effectively reducing the entire company’s energy footprint while increasing both its data security and operational agility.

All mining sites located in dispersed rural locations, where connectivity is an issue, are now connected directly to Azure. This move cuts out a bespoke model where the sites were connected to the corporate building in the past, with the aim of creating a digital mining company.

Managing disparate environments at scale, ensuring uncompromised security and enabling developer agility and innovation are critical to success. Hybrid cloud capabilities must therefore evolve to enable innovation anywhere, while providing a seamless development, deployment and ongoing management experience.

We have introduced Azure Arc for businesses that want to simplify complex and distributed environments. It includes a set of platforms and tools that allow companies to manage their multi-cloud environment, from on-premise applications to those running in Azure or even on the edge.

More importantly, it allows them to manage other hyperscale cloud environments and helps them deal with the administration burden of running a multi-cloud environment.

ĚýDriving innovation

The increased utilisation of public cloud services and the additional investments into private and hybrid cloud solutions will continue to enable South African organisations to focus on innovation and building digital businesses at scale.

We are seeing significant growth for Â鶹ԭ´´ on Azure. We offer on-premise Â鶹ԭ´´ customers the ability to take their workloads into Azure as part of the Project Embrace initiative between Microsoft and Â鶹ԭ´´ announced last year. It is centred around the customer journey to Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA and Â鶹ԭ´´ Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure.

One such customer is Standard Bank South Africa that is making the move to significantly improve the experience customers have with the bank, while enabling it to introduce new solutions to market more efficiently.

The work that we are doing with Standard Bank is the first local demonstration of this partnership and Â鶹ԭ´´ on Azure is one of the fastest growing services that we run locally in Azure.

Additionally, several organisations have decided to move their developer environments into Azure. The acquisition of GitHub and the massive global community that comes with it, sets our customers up for success in terms of driving their developer environments in the cloud.

The presence of localĚýcloudĚýtechnology means more opportunity for economic growth and innovation. Some of the innovation we’re driving are cognitive services and the Internet of Things (IoT), which accelerates customers’ digital transformation and opens the door to build interesting applications.

An example is AB InBev South Africa that is improving its cooler management and gaining new insights with IoT.

ĚýEnabling innovation through partners

Our partners remain key to our strategy and are at the forefront of building solutions that will enable business innovation and digital transformation.

We believe that local service providers will continue to find ways to drive their value.ĚýManaged service providers are showcasing innovation in how they’re levering the power of the public cloud to extend their services and value proposition to customers.

They see the presence of hyperscale platforms as positive for the market because it enables them to provide customers with cloud solutions that might not otherwise be available.

Whether organisations are adopting a pure or hybrid cloud solution, this move will enable the foundation to drive digital transformation, reduce costs, gain insights and achieve business innovation.Ěý

This article first appeared in .

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