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People are different. And for any given company, the people within it often have very different business needs based on the role that they play within the organization. But at Ocean9, we believe that the needs of many of these roles have now converged regarding the power of the public cloud. Below is a look at four distinct personas within a typical company, how they look at today’s challenges in a digital economy, and how Ocean9 can help address them.
When reading across these stories, you’ll notice a common theme: competitive pressure from smaller, more nimble companies using digital technology to swoop in and take away market share. When we talk to customers, this theme comes up frequently.
Please explore these personas and see how they match your own experiences and business challenges.
You’re a senior business executive of a well-known company, and you’re challenged by small upstarts entering the market and delivering new services in new ways at a fraction of your costs. You may be challenged by Amazon in retail, Tesla or UBER in transportation, Netflix and YouTube in media and entertainment, and FinTech startups in banking. From industry to industry, the list goes on.
What you notice is that these competitors are young – and they’ve launched themselves on the public cloud. With grudging respect, you have to admire (quietly) how they scale and adjust to user demands and quickly change business models to seize new opportunities. Amazing how public cloud gives them the ability to turn on a dime, you think.
At your company, the public cloud conversation is moving along at a snail’s pace. Why, you wonder, would anybody put the brakes on leveraging such a source of business agility and innovation? But then you think about the effort required to launch enterprise applications in the cloud – applications like SAP and Oracle databases. There’s got to be a better way, you think.
Finally, you take matters into you own hands – and after searching on google for a few minutes, you find Ocean9, a provider of public cloud solutions for the enterprise with a focus on Database-as-a-Service and SAP-as-a-Service. Ocean9 promises to remove the IT infrastructure complexity and challenges that slow down cloud deployment for enterprise software – giving you the cloud agility that is normally reserved for upstarts only.
First you ask yourself: “Is this too good to be true?” But then you realize, what’s to lose with an hourly subscription model and the promise of deploying a full SAP system in just minutes? You look back on the last time your division rolled out an SAP solution – it took months to just get the additional on-premise infrastructure in place. So, decision made: You call IT and ask them to take Ocean9 for a spin.
After some initial hesitation, your IT team executes on your request – and within days of engaging with Ocean9, they’re up and running with an Ocean9 trial, provisioning fully configured Databases-as-a-Service and SAP landscapes-as-a-Service at their hearts desire. They’re amazed how easy it is and are impressed that the automatically deployed systems are standing up to any kind of performance and security testing. Their final assessment to you is positive, and a corporate decision is made deploy Ocean9 as part of a digital transformation project.
You are impressed when the new digital transformation project comes in under time and budget. And you – as well as other business executives – are excited about the results from a business solution point of view. Everybody agrees that the agility of the cloud, enabled by Ocean9, not only accelerated the project and saved cost on expensive infrastructure also allowed the company to prepare and present many solution and end user experiments that ultimately led to a better result.
In conclusion, public cloud works extremely well for enterprise-grade implementations, especially if managed by an intelligent platform like Ocean9.
You’re the CIO (or a senior IT leader) and you’ve gone through many years of cutting IT budgets and staff. At the same time, the solution landscape is not getting any easier to manage. Public cloud and containerization? They’re promising, but hard to implement for business value. And of course, your business stakeholders are demanding shorter and shorter turn around on their projects – with some going out and procuring IT and cloud solutions on their own. How can you keep up with new development such as hyperscale public clouds, SAP’s transformation to SAP HANA and S/4HANA and other trends like containers? Not having time is one thing, but finding qualified experts in these areas is another.
You realize that there’s merit to arguments in favor of “assemble-to-order” over the older “build-to-order” model. But where can you procure easy infrastructure building blocks for Database-as-a-Service scenarios that can support SAP HANA or database containers – all in a way that makes it easy to move your deployment from infrastructure to infrastructure? It seems like these things are more concepts than anything else. Where’s the beef?
But then you find Ocean9. You’re excited to find out that Ocean9 provides some of the most critical building blocks for transforming complex IT landscapes such as those running SAP. For proof-of-concept projects, the Ocean9 solutions can be deployed in minutes – with an hourly subscription. And yes, they offer free trials too. The solutions offer high performance and high availability – and they’re easy to integrate via well-defined APIs. Time to give the team at Ocean9 a call!
Your business stakeholders and leaders are won over – quite easily, it turns out. All it took was an Internet of Things demo with an early prototype to show your company the power of the public cloud backed by the simplicity of Ocean9. Best of all, this prototype was fast, easy, and inexpensive with cost-optimized cloud configurations and automatic turn on/off capabilities – again made possible by Ocean9.
In short, everybody is happy – staring with your business leaders, but also including key IT employees hungry for innovation and at risk of being lured away by “sexy” startups that promise their engineers the latest and greatest technologies. Finally, you’re able to provide this level of excitement yourself.
You love your job and love the challenge to deliver projects within scope, on schedule, and under budget. Yet, some projects never seem to make it off the ground because initial proof-of-concept (POC) investments are too high – or projects come with such high demands that the chance of delivering against objectives seems exceedingly slim. The common theme in all these projects is that infrastructure – on premise infrastructure, to be precise – is a true bottleneck in delivering cost-effective POCs or speeding up overall project delivery. Couldn’t public cloud be the answer to all these challenges?
While everybody tells you that public cloud does not serve your enterprise requirements around SAP, you decide to explore the option anyway. Sure enough, you find Ocean9 – with the promise to provision development and test systems in minutes and convert these systems into high availability clusters for scenarios such as disaster recovery, all with a few mouse clicks. And wow! – there are videos on YouTube backing this up. Your response is send Ocena9 an email to get the ball rolling.
What a ride. Ocean9 and public cloud exceed your expectations by a long shot. You’re able to support critical phases like late-scope additions and final testing under tough timelines. You can save significant amounts of time for setting up development and test systems overall. You also save a lot of the contingency budget dollars in your back pocket. Yes, nothing beats our hourly and monthly subscriptions for non-production workloads. Everybody, especially the business teams, are happy!
You’ve been working on enterprise-class mission critical systems and databases from SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle for many years. Building and managing them is cool – but lately, you find yourself in a situation where internal staff and systems are under ongoing scrutiny. People ask: “Why are we spending so much money on all these systems with so little business value in return?”
Then you realize where this question is coming from. After all, how many of your ex-colleagues like to gloat on LinkedIn about how magical everything is at the born-in-the-cloud startups they’ve joined? There, the infrastructure is so much more productive. It’s agile, elastic – and utilization is through the roof.
You decide, “It’s either time for me to find a new job, or pick up some of these public cloud skills.” After all, you need to keep your skills up to date to advance your career and feed your growing family.
This is when you take matters in your own hands and explore public cloud for SAP. And yes, the offering out there is growing – including some good documents by AWS ancalled “Quickstarts”. After checking with your manager, you decide to give these documents a try. On your way out, he reminds you that your company will eventually need simple solutions for high availability and disaster recovery and does not have the funds and headcount to hire cloud experts. “Well,” you think. “Let’s give this a try.”
Using the Quickstart documents, you find it was relatively straightforward to build an SAP HANA system. However, while the documents cover the initial deployment well, they do not cover more sophisticated topics like high availability and disaster recovery with the details required. You try automating some of these things yourself, but quickly realize that this may be a multi-year effort to get all the capabilities in place. This is when you discover Ocean9!
Ocean9 gives you access to 160,000 high performance and security-optimized SAP HANA system configurations on AWS alone. And it also allows to choose high availability settings including a cost-neutral version with strong recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) and effortless, cost neutral disaster recovery. In short, a complete intelligent platform for running your database and SAP workloads.
What’s more, since Ocean9 deploys all database and SAP configurations into your own public cloud account, you’re able to inspect and learn from these settings. You wonder whether you could extend one of the systems deployed through Ocean9 – and after some brief study, you have built a simple Internet-of-Things prototype for the concept your company has been talking about for months. Time to tell your manager about this.
You are energized. You can work the cloud. Something to put on your resume right away. And you’re also excited that you were able to connect SAP S/4HANA to an IoT scenario in no time at all. And what you realize is that this is possible only because of the acceleration you get with Ocean9. After all, the truly differentiating business solutions happen at the edges of your SAP setup. So why not rely on an intelligent platform to get a reliable foundation in place and then focus on the truly differentiating topics? You decide that this is the best route for presenting your findings to management. The results? Lots of nodding in agreement. No doubt, no concerns, just excitement.
Suddenly, your career is on turbo mode and now you’re a key player in your company’s digital transformation projects. On the side, based on some blogs you posted, you’re also getting more and more calls from external recruiters – but this is something that nobody else needs to know.
