Michael Welsh

Mar. 28,2018 | SAP, Maintenance and Support

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 ...

Tjeerd Edelman

Feb. 28,2018 | Banking, Financial Services, Managed Services

It was just a few years ago when a leading global consulting firm noted in their financial services outlook, that the “industry would switch gears from defensive compliance remediation to a proactive search for revenue growth and further cost reduction.” As topline growth stayed modest over the years, banks focused mostly on operational efficiencies to drive financial performance improvements. As an example, they looked for scale efficiencies through rationalizing their branch networks with only mixed results. Banks are very complex organizations, but as IT and Finance collaborate more to redefine their role and value, optimizing IT cost as ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 31,2018 | Banking, Financial Services, Mainframe, MCO, Cognitive Transformation, IBM

Back in March 1991, Stewart Alsop, a venture-capitalist and editor of InfoWorld said, “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15th, 1996”. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, so we know now, this could not be further from the truth. The mainframe is not only ‘not’ a dinosaur, it may be the single most important technology in the financial services industry, running almost every large Bank and Insurance Company’s back end system in the world. Still today, seemingly only the mainframe can handle the performance requirements & reliability demands of these challenging operating environments and support the sheer volume of ...

Scott Braden

Nov. 2,2017 | Software, Office365, SaaS, Microsoft

Microsoft is coming to the close of its first half earnings in Q4. If you know what to look for, the timing represents a strategic opportunity to review and optimize your spend. Did you know: When renewing a Microsoft EA or Office365 subscription, most clients experience a net increase in costs of at least 20-25% for the same services, licenses and subscriptions. These increases result from several sources: The low, “teaser” prices offered by Microsoft to get enterprises onto Office365 are not being offered at renewal – despite that there has been no change at all in the services used, and that in general the promise of cloud computing ...

Dave Young

Sep. 29,2017 | Insider, Security, Hacking

Underinvested? Overinvested? Do we have the right supplier(s)? Are we running the right software? Are we using the right security technology? Are our solutions keeping us safe and protected? Do we have applications and a network infrastructure that can be properly protected? These are the starting questions IT and Financial leaders of any organization face today when they look at the Equifax Security Breach – one the largest and deepest in US history. If you are unfamiliar or have chosen to forget it on purpose (apologies in advance if that’s the case), it impacted 140 million consumers’ personal information, including social security ...

Dave Young

Jul. 28,2017

The saying that ‘there is a time and a place for that’ can apply to almost anything in our daily lives, but nowhere is it truer than in technology. The pace of change in some tech areas go at breakneck speed, while others move slower. But the constant for either is that there is always change. For example, there was a ‘time and a place’ for 2-way pagers years ago, but that time is gone now replaced by all manner of smartphones, tablets, and even the IoT’s. Just as there was a ‘time and a place’ for MPLS, it will be - in the not too distant future, added to the historical shelf of technology there was a ‘time and a place for’, just like Frame ...

Scott Braden

Jun. 29,2017

June 30 ends Microsoft’s 2017 fiscal year. Undoubtedly, Redmond will report strong growth in Office365 and Azure cloud sales and corresponding strong profits overall. Following the peak deal-making season that ends June 30th, ‘Microsofties’ begin the summer conference and vacation season with internal meetings, planning sessions, then the large public conferences – most notably the annual worldwide Partner conference, “Inspire” which this year is in Washington DC, July 9th – 13th. At these conferences, Microsoft rolls out the new year’s key products and services, talks with resellers, partners and developers about “what’s hot” this coming ...

Dave Young

Apr. 26,2017

Before you dig into this piece, know that if you have multiple networking certifications, or have been designing and implementing networks for years – this article is probably not for you. If, however, you are interested to learn more about what Software-Defined Networking is (SDN) is and how it can potentially drive cost out of your technology spend and ease the manageability of your network – read on. The network hardware niche is like many others in the technology supplier market. The technology cartel lines up to lock in customers with expensive, proprietary hardware, coupled with complicated firmware to run it all, then typically charge ...

Michael Welsh

Mar. 20,2017

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 ...

Scott Braden

Mar. 6,2017

Follow up to our quote in Redmond Magazine around Microsoft Premium Assurance Plans. Many enterprises deal with the challenges of “legacy” technology solutions, that for whatever reason can’t or haven’t been updated in many years. In our clients, we frequently see cases for example of core / critical applications running on Microsoft Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008, or even older versions. There are many valid reasons to keep using these older installations, including the cost to upgrade / re-platform, lack of vendor support for newer environments, and restrictive licensing rules among disparate suppliers. Whatever the reasons, the result ...