Nature. Nurture. Chicken. Egg. These are timeless debates that exist between people everywhere. The same type of discussions exist in the tech world as we deliberate back and forth between best-of-breed specialty tools and comprehensive solution suites. However, the current outburst of rock star hyper-niche tech solutions is moving the needle back towards best-of-breed. It isn’t just a question of popularity… Updating your EBS implementation through a hybrid cloud design that pulls in best-of-breed technology does more than just protect your EBS investment, it modernizes your business.
Here are three of the many possibilities available to make best-of-breed work for your legacy suite system.
Option #1: Leverage a cloud application to enhance existing business processes
You’re looking around for solutions to improve one of your inefficient businesses processes. For example, let’s say your sales team is still manually building quotes using flat spreadsheets. This slows down the entire sales process and provides limited opportunity to analyze historical pricing and/or sales. As a result, the team misses key information that they could use as a basis for negotiating better deals today. It is possible that your legacy system has a quoting module which may boost effectiveness. However, you shouldn’t and don’t need to be locked into a process based only on the functionality offered by your legacy system. Instead, you can leverage a best-of-breed niche cloud application (app) to enhance your existing on-premise business processes. How?
Instead of defaulting use to whichever on-premise system module that could replace quoting on spreadsheets, you can bring in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that’s been designed from scratch to fill a very specific business need in the most user-friendly way. For example, apps like Oracle’s CPQ Cloud have been designed to excel at one job, in this case accelerating your sales cycle by simplifying your quoting process. Best of all, these apps have been designed to provide robust functionality with easy implementation right out of the box. You can still personalize your best-of-breed SaaS apps, but they’ll require significantly less customization since they’re already specialized.
Bottom line? You can make a quantum leap in modernizing operations by replacing an inefficient business process with a SaaS product that easily integrates into your on-premise system.
Option #2: Use cloud capabilities to access entirely new business processes
Connecting to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies can help you extract value from your on-premise system investment by expanding the number of existing technology tools at your disposal. Specifically, you can use a PaaS environment to break down barriers between applications, digging deep into data stored across any and all of them regardless of geographic location. You can then run previously resource-intensive mass data analysis to use in strategizing and gaining insight to make better business decisions. A PaaS environment can also be used to safely develop and test new functions and processes for applications without risk of interfering with current business operations.
Finally, and of increasing significance, PaaS offers companies a way to start benefitting from adaptive intelligence (or machine learning), empowering applications to make their own smart business decisions. For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered, natural language processing chatbots can help significantly cut customer service costs while improving the overall customer experience. These chatbots can also convert unstructured data, such as customer feedback, into structured data that can be used by your on-premise system.
In summation, utilizing a PaaS solution can be the quickest and most cost-effective way to deploy a leading-edge technology that creates real value for your business.
Option #3: Lose the expense of hardware without having to lose your software
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a type of cloud computing that provides virtual computing resources ranging from servers and storage to network and processors on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. These resources also include a range of services (such as security, load balancing, and backup) to help with infrastructure tasks.
IaaS is a great option for companies that want to focus on their core business purpose and revenue-generating operations instead of information technology. Similar to the PaaS option, IaaS lets companies avoid the capital expense and slow provisioning process of deploying on-premise hardware and/or software to meet fluctuating business needs. Alternatively, IaaS offers a cost-effective option to host and test new applications before companies commit to any hardware or software in-house deployment. In summation, you don’t need to buy what you don’t need and you can easily shed what is no longer needed.
Your Journey, Your Choice
These are just three of the many possibilities that exists to maximize the value of your on-premise suite solution while modernizing with cloud technology. You can choose to integrate with the exact best-of-breed functionalities that work for your unique business needs, making this approach more of an all-encompassing look at both what and how you are using technology to add value to your business.
Talk with us about your business’s priorities and how together we can successfully map out the right path to the cloud for your company.
