Understanding your cloud hosting options

Morning everyone and welcome to our virtual roundtable. The purpose of today is to understand our cloud hosting options. And we're going to have a very informal conversation as people join. It's also built on for some of you that was, I don't know, Inspire events. And it's really just to say, listen, there are certain things happening in the landscape and where do we want to zoom in a little bit, talk a bit more about that. But first of all, then you will see it's me and Middle East and Ludine Nell on the presenting side. We're very mindful that this is a webinar situation, so if there's any questions just put it in the chat and we're just going to handle it from there. So, Ludi is iSWEAR Cloud Lead. ISWEAR is part of EPI-US. It's one of our entities in the group. Myself looking after the partners and some of the strategic clients, but for today just the conversation. So, one of the things that we really thought to start with, if you look at your environment, is common challenges that we have in current on premise environments. And Lydia, don't know if you just want to kick off there. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Madelise. Thank you for the introduction. Nice to be able to speak to you today. Yes, I think I think the common challenges that that's facing a lot of customers from an on premise perspective are probably shared with a lot of people. I think there there is about four major ones, but not limited to just those. Really, I think the first one, which I think everybody's kind of experienced, whether you're a person moving to the cloud or just buying any electronics, think everybody kind of knows what I'm talking about is today the cost of hardware has just become excessively expensive. For customers who are in an environment where they have assets that are starting to come to an end of life and they need to make a decision about the refresh of that hardware, that is a very, very difficult decision to make now. You know, currently the cost of hardware over the last six months has, if I say doubled, quadrupled, I'm not over exaggerating. And in some cases, that's not the only challenge. There are lead times on most hardware at the moment in the market of up to twelve months. So purely just from a hardware perspective, if a customer does consider actually staying on premise and wanting to do a refresh of that hardware, there's a massive massive cost challenge at the moment facing customers. But you know that that's not the only challenge from a from a cost perspective. There is some changes that are happening in the virtualization space in the South African market and in the broader market around licensing. There are major major changes coming down the road about how on premise licensing works. Previously, there was an option to purchase licenses and customers could own those licenses. Those options are starting to disappear. It's now becoming more of a subscription based model that customers are going to be tied into with minimum commits. And we've seen that it has a massive, massive impact from a licensing cost on on premise environments. Not just that, but certain vendors are also pulling out of the African market as they don't see it as part of their strategic value moving forward, which I think is a concern and is a risk for a lot of customers. I think another thing that people don't take into consideration is depending on what your strategy is from a cloud perspective and what cloud you're going to move towards, there is also a consideration around what your own internal team can do and what skills your own internal team basically has. So depending on what cloud you're going to move to and depending on how mature your own internal team is, there is a challenge that your team needs to basically reskill themselves because running an on premise cloud environment and moving towards a certain cloud environment requires a complete different skill set. That is a challenge that customers have from an on premise perspective and a consideration that customers need to take. I think something else that a lot of people don't take into consideration is also just, I, you know, from an on premise perspective, am I going to be tied in moving to the cloud? That is a concern that customers have. You know, do I stay on premise? What workload is good from an on premise perspective compared to a cloud perspective? I think the one thing that we and you'll probably hear this term again later on is around hybrid is what is the right workload? Do I need to keep certain things on premise? Do I need to keep certain things in the cloud? And I think that's a consideration and a challenge that customers need to figure out. I think if I can just add to the specific point and maybe summarize a little bit. I mean, the one thing that is reality currently is the increasing hardware cost. There's a shortage of hardware due to the AI movement and everybody buying up hardware. In some cases, these delays or lead times for hardware from over currently 12 plus. So, it's a real challenge for some of our clients that is currently on premise, because you just can't add. And what do you do? And how do you do that? So, that's definitely a challenge. And then I think, like other vendors, there is a, as you know, VMware exiting the Eastern Europe and Africa market. So there is a change coming up for middle of next year, June, that we will not have that VMware. And I mean, without giving our ages away, but VMware started being really popular in South Africa in 2002. We all were on VMware. It was a fantastic way to connect all your offices, all your whatever you wanted to connect. You didn't need to fly to Durban or Cape Town. You could just connect all the technical people via VMware initially. So it's a long stretch in South Africa. So it is something that we just need to consider. And then I think the other thing that we see in the current on premise environment is then the delayed lifecycle refreshes. So people were holding back, holding back because they don't know what's going to happen. And it's really sometimes like holding back too long before you sell your car. And then if you want to sell it, know, it's such a big step that you have to take. And that's what we see as some of the common challenges. So I think if we move then to the next discussion point, and that's really the impact of on premise environments on cloud production and infrastructure. And meaning with infrastructure that it's really on all fronts. It's not just your hardware. It's more than that. So, Ludi, do you want to say a bit more on that? Yes, absolutely. You know, I think the impact on on premise environments, again, as I mentioned before, I think it has a lot to do with hybrid. You know, what is the strategy that a customer has in moving to the cloud? What is the right workload? I think the perception, and I know a lot of people have heard me say this quite a lot, is there is a perception that it's an all or nothing kind of commitment when you look at cloud, that you have to basically take everything and move everything to the cloud. I I I don't believe that. I think it's very much industry specific. It is very dependent on what you want to achieve from a cloud perspective. So that should really, really be the focus and consideration from an on premise perspective. I think something that we've mentioned from an on premise perspective is that just because you're moving to the cloud, it doesn't mean that you can't still get some value on your older assets at the end of the day. I think there are some really innovative ways that you can approach cloud. We have customers who have basically made a decision to actually work their, move their production environment into the cloud. And you can still repurpose a lot of the infrastructure that you have on premise. That can be used as a testing environment. It can be used as a training environment. It can be used as disaster recovery if you still have the option to sweat those assets. That can still be repurposed at the end of the day from a disaster recovery perspective. And Lydia, want to add because I think it's an important point you're making. We often do think, or there is a perception, it's all or nothing. And to basically plan your landscape, to see what is your current assets, and maybe to move it a bit around. We also recently had quite a few clients where they might open a new site and that will then, believe it or not, on premise site and then they recycle their hardware to do certain things. So I think the hybrid approach using current hardware might be Doctor, it might be for backups, or it might be for non prod environments or even production environments, depending. There might have been an acquisition and then suddenly there's lots of hardware available. So it's not the all and all nothing approach. I think that is important. And then also another term that we've used quite often is, which is a reality here, is to the cloud and bank. Lily has spoken about that. So initially, that whole idea of people are so it's very similar with AI now. People are so afraid that they might be left behind. And then it was the thing to move to the cloud, and now we see the same people that moved to the cloud are now moving out of the cloud again for whatever reason. So, I think that's important. And then another point that you can maybe say more about. Guys, what we're sharing with you is not new. It is to determine for your specific industry or your specific company in a specific industry what is the way you're going. Because we have this ever growing cloud and we just have more and more data or these acquisitions or we dissolve something. What do we do with our data at the end of the day? But latency in the real world. I often say people talk about latency sometimes lightly, but if you really have a latency problem in a certain area of your business, where it's critical depending on the industry, is it financial services, is it more important in financial services sometimes? I mean there's lots of fraud happening because people will send you something and say, Listen, but we have paid and you can deliver or do whatever you need to do. And then there's a delay and then actually the transaction is not happening. The healthcare is a completely different environment. How long can you wait for a certain message to come through? Maybe a bit more on latency if you want to, and then cloud, to the cloud and back Rudy. Sure. I think you just touched on something very pertinent for the South African market. I mean, reality is that we do still have challenges from a connectivity perspective. So latency, depending on what type of industry you're in, can be a limiting factor in you moving to the cloud. Not just from a latency perspective, think there's something else that you kind of mentioned, Madlis, that is very, very pertinent. It really also depends on what type of industry you're in. There are really some type of industries and some type of workloads that will never move to the cloud. Very, very quickly, I can think of manufacturing, the mining industry, as you mentioned, medical industry. There is real, real, real motivating factors for certain type of workloads within those industries to never, never move to the cloud. And again, I think that's why the conversation around hybrid is so pertinent. It's looking at the right workload, moving it to the cloud for the right reason at the end of the day. Again, that is what way the whole conversation around to the cloud and the back has become. Is people are reevaluating what they want to achieve from a cloud perspective and certain workloads, again, not conducive to having them in the cloud. We are seeing a real, real movement in the market where certain type of workloads are moving back on premise. It is an absolute reality. And I think it's just coming back to know your environment and document maybe a high level map. Have a high level map, see exactly what happened, because what was maybe good a year ago to change is not good today. Just know your current environment and then you can start to move it around And it's not all or nothing, it's a hybrid. It's also not and that's often what happens with us as companies is we get a bit afraid to then take that next step because we just hear things that didn't work. We hear the negative side. We also hear it's going to cost us so much less and then often that's also not the case because maybe the current on premise environment was such a risk we just didn't know about it. Then we're moving these workloads and suddenly it's costing us more and then there's the perception that maybe if we didn't move it wouldn't have cost us more. So it is a conversation and it's a good conversation. So I think let's move to the next topic, and that is your SAP Landscape Transformation. Guys, there's lots of acronyms in our IT environment, but I think the understanding that I have of SAP Transformation is it's really restructuring and data alignment. And what data is more important for the next couple of years? What data do we just cannot afford to lose? But Rudy, if you want to say a bit on that and then I'll add. Yes, you know, I think SAP landscape transformation and data alignment and restructuring of data, I think it ties into where the SAP strategy is in the market at the moment. There is a lot happening, you know, purely from a SAP perspective. There are certain deadlines in the not too distant future where certain products and licenses are coming to an end. So there is pressure on customers to to potentially transform their environments, to move their environments. That is where the data alignment basically comes is if I'm going to be doing a transformation of my SAP landscape potentially from an older version of a database to a newer version of a database, it is absolutely necessary to do an assessment of your landscape. Do I need to take all of the data with me? It has an impact from a migration perspective. It has an impact from an infrastructure perspective. It has an impact from a cost perspective. There is a lot happening within the SAP environment at the moment. I think everybody's kind of heard about Rise. I think the one thing that is important is, you know, from a SAP landscape transformation, it is important for customers to potentially look at their environment and see what is available because moving to RISE is not necessarily conducive for all customers at the end of the day. There are certain customers that will only move certain workloads to RISE and keep other workloads as archive systems. So there is a lot of consideration to basically take into mind before you basically go on that journey from a RISE perspective. And I think without going into detail on the SAP RISE, but we just had a conversation earlier this morning. That's why it's top of my mind on my side. Just to say, listen, but what is this roadmap to RICE and what must people do? And that's not people that are not currently on RICE, it's providers from infrastructure and other perspective. And I think the important part is that is what you will see in the market, that's what you will have seen in our blogs, that there are certain dates. Vendors, if it's SAP or whoever it is, doesn't matter. If we use SAP as an example, you know, there's a 2027 date. In VMware, there's a 2027 date. In SAP, there's a 2030 date. There's a 2040 date. You know, then you start to think, wow, you know, what is this? And again, is then you say, but where are you now and what is really going to be the impact on my company in 2027? Is it something that if I don't do anything about it, that they might just extend my license and I didn't give input? That's why this conversation is time wise good. We do have time. Nothing is going to burn tomorrow, but we do need to start the conversations going forward to say listen, this is what we're going to do. And then also, on a different point, the system merges. We often see that, I mean there will always be system mergers, one company is buying the other, or they're buying this or they're buying that, if it's the mining industry or the health industry or the retail industry. And that's where the opportunity often lies, when we see then, you know, what do we do with this data? Don't forget about our products. We do have the beautiful EPI-USE products. That's always such a good strategy for me for EPI-USE Labs, where there's certain products that we can use to assist us and we either then do the migrations using these products. Sometimes our clients do have the products, they don't have to buy the product, but in some cases they have it. If they don't buy it, we use the product, we assist them, we archive the data, for example with Archive Central, and then we actually have an opportunity. So what I'm sharing with you is sometimes there's something in your company happening and that's then the opportunity, so there's suddenly a new company. Why don't we relook our whole IT space, our IT landscape, and let's decide what can we optimize then for going forward or beyond today? So I think that is more or less just a little bit on SAP Analytics. I don't know, Ludi, if you still the one term that I've jotted down when we chatted about it earlier this week, Ludi, is that at the end of the day I always say to people I want to harmonize everything. I want to harmonize the data because if your data harmonizes, your whole life is a bit more harmonized I believe. But I don't know if you want to add last comment and then we can move to the next slide, or the next topic. Yeah, I think mentioning the deadlines, I think people shouldn't panic about deadlines. I think people should have a calm discussion about what we want to achieve, purely not just from an on premise cloud perspective, but also from a SAP landscape transformation perspective. I think the message that is maybe lost in all of the noise because of the deadlines is customers have choice. There are a lot of options available. It's not an all or nothing. Again, very similar to the conversation around cloud. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing one type of solution. There are really, really a lot of options available to customers to get the best results from a SAP transformation perspective. I think that's really, really important. Yeah. Happy, happy. The next topic really optimise the ever growing business cloud environment. And it's a nice word, some of you might know it, but they talk about cloud spool happens. So if you want to just say something about it, because I think it's so relevant it's such a like the virtualization trappy. That was a trappy that we were caught in for quite some time, which was not too bad. So all traps are not always bad, but just explain a bit to the rest of us the cloud sprawl. What does that really mean? Cloud sprawl is really, really interesting. You know, there is let me put it this way. I think in the beginning, again, like you said, I'm going to give my age away A decade ago when we kind of this journey and when when the whole cloud conversation started, there was the promise that cloud was going to be very, very cost effective and it was going to save customers a lot of money. And ultimately, it kind of did if you looked at the whole total cost of ownership. I do think that there is still a lot of savings that that can be passed on to customers from a cloud perspective. But unfortunately, one of the strengths that cloud has is also one of the potential weaknesses from a cost perspective. And what do I mean by that? One of the superpowers that you have from a cloud perspective is you are able to scale up and scale out very, very quickly. So you need a training system. It's not a question of the challenges that you have from an on premise perspective at the moment where you have to get quotes, infrastructure, and set up the infrastructure and wait times. It's really, really easy to spin up new workloads. I need a need a new database. I've got a new project. It's not a problem. It's very, very quick to basically spin up new infrastructure. So time to work very, very short. The problem with that is, and I think everybody knows where I'm going towards is, you then have a tendency. It's it's it's more workloads, more workloads, more workloads. And as we know, as projects go, as things start falling on the wayside, before you know it, you have this massive cloud environment, and that's where we mentioned cloud sprawl. Suddenly you have this out of control infrastructure environment that can become extremely, extremely costly. And that is definitely a challenge from a cloud environment is to control that spore. It it is also depending on what type of cloud environment you're in. It can sometimes also be challenging to to to control your costs, to to actually see a good view of what your costs are. You know, a lot of the cloud environment is a paper use type environment, and you know, if you have a massive cloud sprawl, that those costs can run away with you very, very, very quickly. And that is the major challenge from a cloud perspective. I think the other thing So what I hear, pause a little Ludi, what I hear is what I really hear Ludi is saying, so Cloud Squares, it's easy setup. Quickly. We just get you switched on within a day, the weekend, or whatever the case might be. What then happens in your organisation is you get the shadow IT. So suddenly everybody starts to do their own thing, and before you see everybody, every department or every company starts to just buy their own services, before you see we don't know exactly if you're responsible for that environment, what's going on, because everybody is just doing what they need to do and they think they're doing the right thing. You just see how that cloud is growing. Then what is also happening, suddenly you see forgotten assets. So everybody's doing their own thing. And we forget about that server room that's sitting somewhere in the basement or wherever it's sitting. You just forget about that asset. Because we have people doing their own thing. And I mean, it's often bigger companies as well. It can be smaller companies, but every department doing their own thing. And then the biggest thing that I see there is then your security blind spots. So suddenly your security is just also just somewhere. So I think a very important topic, Ludi continue on what you want to share with us because all we see is that small cloud suddenly becomes a very big cloud and we don't know. We just don't know exactly as the word is saying what is part of that cloud. And then we have all kinds of things, I think we've seen a couple of things, not just in our region, suddenly data is just not secure. So maybe also something about sovereign cloud if we want to. Yeah, Madhlise, thank you. I think you made an excellent, excellent point that I think kind of gets lost in the conversation. You know, we're all or I'm at least an infrastructure person. So, you know, the conversation is always about compute and infrastructure, but the consideration around cloud sprawl and the impact that that has from a compliance and security perspective is not something that can be underestimated. Again, that has a cost impact. Not considering what you're doing from a security perspective can have the ultimate cost impact over a long term period. You mentioned data sovereignty. I mean, is becoming something that is a term that everybody's talking about is where is my data located? Who has control of my data? Again, that is something to take in consideration from a cloud store perspective. Know, a lot of the times it's, oh, I've got a development system and I've deployed it in this region. You know, what type of data is in that region? Who has access to that data? What is the security posture of those development systems? So absolutely something that needs to be taken into consideration. Another thing that that I kind of also think that people need to take into consideration is just around the right sizing of environments as well. And again, it's one of those pitfalls when you go into the cloud and depending on what cloud you basically go into. You have a tendency in the beginning to overspec systems and a lot of the times throwing resources at a problem. You also don't always have the opportunity to downsize workloads depending on what type of cloud you're in. You know, it's always good to upgrade, but you're never necessarily allowed to downgrade. That is an exercise that people don't do on a regular basis. Have a look at what type of resources are my workloads actually consuming. Is there an opportunity to right size those workloads? Or is there resources that I'm not utilizing at the end of day? And over a large environment, that can have a massive cost impact for customers. And I think it's something that people sometimes overlook. But I think the responsibility from our side as well. I mean, we do have many clients, some of them on the conversation, or part of this conversation, is to really also have the trust from the client that we will look at this, because before we send out the bill for this month, we relook. We see we can downsize here a bit for the next month. And it sounds very trivial to say, look good at monthly, but we can see we're not using this. So, to have the responsibility to say, listen guys, we can downsize a little bit here. It's going to cost you less. But at the same time, we sometimes say to the client, we are upsizing a little bit because there's a risk for us. So I think to have that relationship that we have with many of our clients and strategic partners, and that they also trust us, At the end of the day, we can also say nothing. Because not because we don't want to say nothing, because we don't take the time to look, but to have it as part of your process to basically just say, listen, this is your current environment. So the right sizing concept is one thing, but implementation of that right sizing as an ongoing business partnership is something that I think we do. So, I think we can then move and I think we're nearly there and I hope everybody is still enjoying the conversation. Sometimes difficult for me if we don't have people that can talk to us, but we're using this as an opportunity to also make sure that we know our story and we will have other clients that requested that we do a one on one. So anybody on the call, if you also want a one on one it's good. But let's just close off then with different types of support available, Ludi. We just said private, on premise, rise so you can say anything you like. Thank you, but please. I think again, I think I think it is around the there is maybe not again visibility within the market to know what are the different types of support that are available. And I think this is a much larger conversation and a much longer conversation that one can have with customers. There is a lot of challenges around the different types of support. As an example, and I don't want to single anything out, specifically from a Rise perspective. You know, one of the things that we've kind of seen from a Rise perspective is customers don't necessarily know what is included from a support perspective when it comes to Rise. What are the limitations? Is there going to be a change in support moving from RISE to to the typical engagement that I had with a partner and and and there might be some major differences? Then, you know, the simple, simple thing is it's control versus convenience. You know, I give away control of my environment or the perceived control of my environment? Whether and keeping that in house and how do you do the responsibility boundaries? Who's responsible for what when it comes to support at the end of the day from an on premise and a private cloud? I think my final thing that I kind of just want to leave, and again, we could probably have a two hour conversation just around support and the different models, that there are just a lot of different options. I think there is a perception in the market that depending on what type of cloud you engage with, that there are only certain type of support models. I think there's a lot of flexibility. As I've mentioned before, that responsibility boundary about how you separate who does what from a customer and from a support perspective. Yeah, that's great. So think it's really what our closing comment is here. All we want to do is, let's just take time, assess current environments, and understand what the actual needs are, and then choose a cloud hosting approach. And I specifically put it in behind your business today. So, what is good for your business today might not be good for your business in six months, depending on the business. Others, it might be good in two years still. It doesn't matter, but at least we do have a bit of a roadmap. And I'm very mindful that you don't always know everything. We can try to predict whatever is going to happen in our business environment. But that is also not possible. At least if we have a bit of a plan and we had some conversations, can just make better decisions going forward. So I think that is really from our side. Thanks for listening in and thanks for having a conversation with us. Are you going to give people access? No, okay. So we're just going to open up a little bit of a conversation if possible or are we just going to do the poll? Okay, so I think importantly, next steps in your cloud journey. You might think maybe after today. And I always say if you walk out here, know there's day job. But what are maybe some of the things we're going to do? I'm going to have an internal discussion with my team. It's interesting. And if that is what you're going do, it's also good. I'm interested in an IT landscape assessment. Maybe get a bit of support from our team, if that's what you want to do. We really just point out one or two things, prioritise. And I always say with any of this, if you see one or two things, it might change how you think going forward. Then I'm going to have a conversation with relevant stakeholders maybe. Or you know what, I just need time to think a bit about it. So if you want to take part in the poll, you're welcome, but otherwise we'll just take it from me. Okay guys, but have a lovely week and we'll be in contact again with you on further conversations. You.