As we've been saying for months, post (hopefully) pandemic Market Conditions are ripe for you to act in driving business value into your company. If you've ever dreamed of being the budget hero, this is it. With the tumult in the supplier marketplace around M&As, shifts of products to the cloud, small company disruptions, the supplier competition has never been as robust. Once you digest the list below and want more, we're happy to talk. There's nothing we like better than chatting about how to get more value from technology suppliers - especially now. Big Software SAP Nearly 100% of SAP deals come due in December. This is driven by ...
Read More
Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...
Read More
SAP CEO Christian Klein is in a tough spot, trying to minimize the damage of a brand that has lost ground to competitors who have better adapted to the new reality of cloud computing. This exposure has been amplified during the global pandemic and has negatively impacted SAP’s profitability in a time when other companies are prospering due to customers’ increased dependency on technology and automation. In an attempt to remedy these challenges and re-focus his brand, Klein is promoting a new program for ‘business transformation as a service’, dubbed “RISE with SAP”. SAP plans to migrate your ERP to its cloud, promising to improve and speed ...
Read More
Since 2002, we have been helping clients optimize technology spend and have maintained a continuously updated list of suppliers where we know we can extract value with a high yield. VMware has been and seems destined to remain at or near the top of this list for the foreseeable future. VMware is credited with commercializing compute virtualization technologies with their popular vSphere product, enabling multiple virtual applications to run concurrently on a single physical host. This increased utilization of IT resources has dramatically improved the economics of enterprise datacenter infrastructure, vaulting VMware to a market dominant ...
Read More
There are a couple ways to interpret the title of this article, and neither are necessarily wrong. The more appropriate context is meant to convey the various ways in which cloud utilization is sub optimized and therefore getting wasted. Taken another way however, you could interpret your Cloud as a living breathing entity that has overindulged in mind altering substances and is currently out of control. If we’re really being honest, neither description is wrong as a generalized assessment of enterprise cloud utilization and spend. According to multiple research reports, company executives are projected to: Waste $17B in the Cloud as an ...
Read More
Unbelievably, it’s been four years since we published an article titled: Top Questions to Ask When Taking the Slow Road to SAP (S4) HANA. And despite that passage of time, not much has really changed about SAP’s predictability. We outlined six considerations to weigh before investing further in SAP’s vision of the future. The intent of that article was to invoke questions that would cause SAP customers pause and consider both short- and long-term issues that may have been considered foregone conclusions related to S/4 HANA. There is a famous saying that every history teacher probably says a hundred times a year to students, “Those who fail ...
Read More
December is the busiest month of the year for many suppliers, including of course SAP as they look to shore up, lock up, and secure their end of year financials. A vast majority of SAP contracts renew effective January 1. There are both opportunities to be had and pitfalls to avoid in this end of year run to 2019 and beyond. Below we outline just a few things to look out for and encourage you to chat with us to make sure you are getting the most out of your agreements, investments and relationships with SAP. SAP has its share of challenges. There is discontent amongst its partners, customers, and previous cheerleaders. SAP’s cloud roadmap is ...
Read More
As many of you may already know, most SAP renewal deals ‘come due’ in December, as they are generally annualized to the calendar year, as are most new SAP license purchases and expansions. SAP is hungry for new licensing revenue, so customers can expect to see increased activity around year-end audits. Now is the time to start planning (and saving), especially if you’re already paying for annual maintenance and support services from to SAP. If you are ready to go ahead and write SAP another huge check for the upcoming year and are unconcerned about the value you’re getting for these large investments, check your pulse…you may be a software ...
Read More
Oracle has doubled down – literally – in their ploy to shore up declining revenue in its traditional licensing model. Filed under ‘in case you missed it’, Oracle starting in January literally doubled the cost of running its software in the AWS cloud. Here is a basic summary: Previously each one vCPU was equivalent to .5 Oracle Processor License or two vCPU required a Processor license….but now: AWS EC2 and RDS - one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled The same increase applies to Microsoft with: Microsoft Azure – one Azure CPU Core as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license The net of it ...
Read More
Oracle’s history with the cloud has been somewhat (shall we say) evolving. As recently as 2008, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has called the cloud “complete gibberish”, “insane”, and likened its “idiocy” to that of “women’s fashion”. Later he said that cloud was his idea. Still later, Larry Ellison said he liked the brand of “cloud computing”, calling it “charismatic”. Then, at OpenWorld 2014, Oracle declared itself “King of the Cloud”. We found this suspicious at the time, given Oracle’s true standing in the cloud was diametrically opposed to its public statements at that time. The legions of techie’s at Oracle were hard at work to have ...
Read More
