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WILL “RISE WITH SAP” BE YOUR DOWNFALL?

Michael Welsh
Feb. 18,2021 | Software SAP

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 ...

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Time to Extract Value from VMware

Michael Welsh
Feb. 11,2021 | Cloud VMware

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 ...

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IBM’s Diminishing Role in the Modern Enterprise

Steven Zolman
Feb. 9,2021 |

Introduction Our clients are digitally transforming and migrating workloads to the cloud, while simultaneously minimizing their dependency on IBM for legacy IT. Due to a variety of factors discussed in this article, Clients have developed a strong resistance to offering IBM a seat at the table in their digital transformation journeys, choosing instead to diminish IBM’s role in the Modern Enterprise to avoid putting their future at risk. Contents: IBM Posts Another Dismal Quarter and Year 5 of IBM’s Top 6 Industries are in Open Disruption Clients have Accelerated Digital Transformation Initiatives Cloud as the Strategic Endpoint of the Modern ...

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12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series - Number One: Shut it Down

Shut it off. Simple right? Sounds like something you might say to your children whenever they leave the light on in a room. But like any endeavor, shutting off instances in the cloud does take some amount of wherewithal and effort. Begin by identifying idle and under-utilized instances out of your fleet. By leveraging native analytics (e.g. AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Advisor, Google Compute Engine), you can generate a list of these instances across regions and workloads. After a quick audit with your technology team or application owners, you can take a step toward savings realization by: Terminating/deleting idle instances ...

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Opportunity in Chaos: WFA Enablement can Help Clients Reduce Costs by Up to 75%

Changes in the market forcing clients to embrace Work-from-Anywhere (WFA) employees creates opportunities for clients to transform technology enablement; improving collaboration, increasing productivity and corporate knowledge management, while reducing security threats and end user computing costs (by as much as 67-75% in ideal cases). The 2020 scramble to re-equip and upgrade workers to enable productivity “from home” or “from anywhere” has changed the nature of end-user computing, maybe forever. However, our clients continue to seek ways to help employees, contractors, suppliers, and customer ecosystems to collaborate better, boosting ...

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2021: Oracle Audits the World

If you thought Oracle audits were an issue in past years, buckle your seat belts for 2021. We expect Oracle audits to reach new heights of frequency and intensity over the coming months, specifically around Q2 2021. The driving factor is based on macro-market conditions that have been out of their control: Oracle has essentially been on hiatus for a year, not able to get on site and pester their customers about license compliance. Oracle customers have been more cost conscientious than in years past and have been more active in cancelling support for unused products. The global pandemic has caused many customers to delay or even scrap plans ...

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Financial Services Series: Four Ways to Find Savings and Reduce Opex Now

The IT landscape in Financial Services is changing rapidly. Regardless if they want to be industry leaders, fast followers of reactors, the ever-spreading cost base for Financial Services Companies leaves less budget available for capital investments in new technology, driving a vicious cycle of increased operating cost. In the drive to enact transformational change, Financial Services Companies should seek out the benefit from low hanging fruit to reduce current Opex. According to a PwC Global FinTech survey, 81% of CEOs are concerned about the speed of technology change, which is more than any other industry sector. Thousands of startups ...

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SolarWinds Breach: Three Lessons You Need to Heed

What do the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department, The White House, the NSA, all five branches of the US military, the top ten U.S. telecommunications companies, and four hundred twenty-five of the Fortune 500 all have in common? Given the title of this article, you already have a clue, which is that they are all SolarWinds customers. Those are just some of the higher profile organizations, but in all there are 300k SolarWinds customers around the world, with about 18k identified as impacted. The impact of this breach is so far and deep, the actual repercussions will not be fully understood for years potentially. However, we don’t have to wait ...

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Supplier Profits and 5 Year End Sales Tactics They Use Against You

The end of year mania is underway as sales professionals from some of the largest tech companies on the planet try to capture and fill their Q4 quota. When such a substantial portion of a sales rep’s income rests on their ability to separate company dollars from your budget, it’s no wonder we often witness such unbridled aggression this time of year. It can be personally traumatic for salespeople as they sit in their weekly (sometimes daily) sales meetings with their respective teams, while management tears apart their sales opportunities and deals often in front of their peers with questions like: What is the status of deal x/update on ...

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AWS Outage: Plan Ahead to Avoid Future Catastrophe

AWS experienced a significant outage on November 21st, 2020 that impacted customers located in one (US-East-1) of AWS’ 23 geographic regions. The region was significant however, given the number of companies that publicly stated their issues via social media channels: Coinbase Glassdoor iRobot – impacted home app which, according to LinkedIn security employee, effected his ability to vacuum home Roku Vonage The Washington Post Ring doorbells started not working And more… According to a report by ZDnet, AWS attributed the outage “to errors with its Kinesis data-streaming service. While many of the impacted services don't use AWS Kinesis, ...

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