On Friday January 22nd, we hosted our first Mindset Cloud Roundtable. After a series of successful DevOps-focused roundtable discussions, the Cloud topic was the next most demanded topic among our participants, so Cloud we discussed!
We don’t record our roundtable discussions in order to help create an environment where people feel as comfortable as possible discussing complex and sometimes difficult issues around driving adoption of new technologies and ways of working. Because of this, we try to recap the discussions afterwards for those who couldn’t make it.
With the announcements from the RISE with SAP event focused on business transformation through cloud adoption, it seemed like a good time to dive back into the roundtable recap, so here are some of the key topics we covered.
Defining Cloud
One of the topics of conversation and questions that permeated the entire event was questions about the types of cloud. So many different categorizations exist, and thinking through all the different breakdowns of cloud solutions can be dizzying. Here are a few of the different ways of breaking down cloud that came up:
- Infrastructure/Platform/Software (*aaS)
- Public vs. Private
- Single vs. Multi-tenant
- A special one of the SAP folks: Neo vs. Cloud Foundry
- Hyperscaler differentiation
Benefits of Cloud
One of the things at top of mind for me was to get a read on the expected benefits of cloud. With my focus on development, I tend to see cloud in terms of improved capabilities, speed, and flexibility. But I know that businesses often expect to see financial and operational efficiencies and cost savings from moves to cloud. This expectation is reflected in the responses to one of our survey questions provided by roundtable participants.
This expectation of cost savings also permeated the RISE with SAP event.
One word of warning: We hear about a lot of cloud adoption journeys, and one recurring theme is that while these journeys can pay off in big ways, cost savings is often hard to quantify. If you are expecting cost savings from a move to cloud, identify exactly how that’s going to happen and measure it carefully.
Neo vs. Cloud Foundry
At this point it’s an old topic, but it came up multiple times in our roundtable conversations. Should we choose Neo or Cloud Foundry? Is there a difference in capabilities? How about ability to abide by domestic compliance requirements?
We didn’t have time to get into the topic in detail, but suffice it to say that Cloud Foundry is SAP’s way forward with the Business Technology Platform. Neo has not been receiving significant investment for a couple years now, and almost all new investment goes towards Cloud Foundry-based solutions. There are still, however, some complications around local compliance requirements, so this may force customers to make some difficult decisions. If you can go with Cloud Foundry, then that’s the answer, but in some situations there won’t be a clear correct approach.
Round tables coming up
All-in-all, the first roundtable was an excellent and lively discussion. I’d encourage you to join us for upcoming roundtable discussions:
- February 12 – DevOps Roundtable
- March 26 – Fiori Roundtable
- May 14th – Our next Cloud Roundtable, with signup available soon
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