Blog post by Theodoor van Donge

In my last blog post, the focus was primarily on the development frameworks we offer in our Cordys Cloud offering. In this blog, we will focus on the theme: “Agility to ERP – unlock your SAP installation”.

In this context, I like to use the metaphor of a car: Cordys provides the ideal solution to connect the ERP engine to other business critical. In other words, it means leveraging existing systems and investments but still drive business efficiency and start innovating by blending SAP systems with other on-premise applications as well as cloud services.

In this blog post, I will touch upon the remaining aspects of James Staten’s 2013 predictions “We will Finally Get Real About Cloud’ which he recently made on Forbes.com in the context of ‘Agility to ERP’.

You might remember these points from my previous post about James Staten’s 2013 predictions:

• We’ll finally stop saying – “everything is going cloud”.
• Cloud and mobile will become one.
• We’ll stop stressing about cloud SLAs.
• We’ll get real about cost modeling.
• Infrastructure and Operations will free the development teams to build apps in the cloud.
• We’ll get real about using the cloud for backup & DR.
• We’ll stop equating cloud with commodity.  
• We’ll stop equating cloud with AWS.
• We’ll acknowledge that advanced virtualization is a good thing, and no, it’s not a cloud.
• Developers will awaken too: Development isn’t all that different in the cloud

What does ‘Agility to ERP’ mean? Ever thought about this? Pretty ‘open-door’ questions I would say, but you have to think about it twice.

The roadmap of the ERP vendors highlights the fact that it completely fulfills all your dreams for the coming years, and it feels pretty safe, that somebody else is thinking about your business problems. But is that the right attitude? Do you know that adopting new releases of ERP software is a huge investment, especially when you have created your own version of it by customizing the ERP software? Well, if you de-customize your ERP software and take it as standard software as it was developed, you could achieve a big improvement in Total Cost of Ownership. You could also add customizations to your ERP system to support your true business advantage. Cordys BOP is ‘the’ agile platform you could be looking for to design, implement, innovate and improve those additional capabilities for your enterprise.

With Cordys you can:

• Create solutions for the extended enterprise, on the supply- and demand side
• Build mobile workflows on top of SAP
• Connect SAP to other systems, on-premise and from the cloud
• Create a single, integrated view of information
• Rollback to “vanilla” ERP to reduce your customizations and drive lower cost

Cordys enables faster delivery of new applications, processes and solutions developed for specific business needs, while safeguarding the core ERP functionality. The Cordys platform is offered as a cloud service or can be run on-premise. This gives you innovation at lower cost with improved flexibility and agility, speed of change in your business operations and allows your company to differentiate from your competitors using the same ERP back-end.

Let me talk about each of the highlighted Staten’s 2013 predictions:

We’ll stop stressing about cloud SLAs: Fully agreed, you can use our platform to build your solutions, depending on the complexity of the solution, which differs per business process definition or even per process instance (importance of customer or value of contract). It is very difficult to place all this in contracts. The Cordys BOP scale-out architecture gives you always enough room to scale.

We’ll get real about cost modeling: The point James Staten is making is right, but this is a challenge for the providers. There is a minimal cost that needs to be covered, but we have to continuously make this lower. Supporting the customer’s expansion/reduction plans is vital.

We’ll get real about using the cloud for backup and Disaster Recovery (DR): Yes, Cloud centers and networks can have problems. Offering a DR capability for your Smart Process Applications is a necessity.

We’ll stop equating cloud with commodity: Many business services, especially when they are oriented to support the value chain of your enterprise, are much better supported with a cloud-based offering. These offerings deal with complexities like: multi-organizations aspects, role aspects, connectivity aspects, organization specific customizations, etc and not just commodity solutions as such. It’s all about simplifying complexity and Cloud is a big contributor to that.

We’ll stop equating cloud with Amazon Web Service (AWS): Although AWS has set the benchmark for the industry; many more aspects need to be considered when choosing a Cloud center. Probably a ‘local’ Cloud center is a better choice. Distance, good contacts, low latency, and such others need to be considered as well. Another good alternative can be offered by your preferred Systems Integrator, many of them have a Cloud service. They have good knowledge of your solution, your requirements, etc. In my blog BOP-in-the-Cloud I have mentioned about this as well.

We’ll acknowledge that advanced virtualization is a good thing, and no, it’s not a cloud: Sure we have a hybrid deployment pattern. That’s the strength of the Cordys Cloud offering, you can extend your existing solutions deployed in your data center with Cloud based solution. By doing so, you can rapidly extend the existing IT solutions.

I’ll end this blog post with a great video that explains how a leading aircraft manufacturer extended SAP to keep its aircraft flying, improved the quality of service and supported global customer service:

In my next blog, I would like to talk about the rise of Industry specific models for process, capabilities, entities and what its impact could be.