Digital transformation has put technology at the heart of almost everything we do. Today, nearly all of our actions are powered by an app designed to assist with a particular process or function. In our personal lives, we check our diaries with an app, the weather with an app, we buy food with an app and communicate via a whole raft of them.
In the business world, companies are trying to rapidly digitise and transform their internal core operations. They want to do things better, faster and cheaper, become more customer oriented, more data driven, drive greater speed to market, and do things like close their books faster and hire and promote better. They also need to conduct specialist tasks, specific to their business model and industry.
Driving this digital innovation is hard. With market conditions and competitors constantly changing, and many areas of IT facing a skills shortage, most organisations can’t develop all of this software fast enough or on their own.
As a result of this rising adoption of cloud-based software applications, the independent software vendor (ISV) market is expected to reach $ 4,078 billion by 2027, up from $ 1,573 billion in 2019 globally. In addition, much of this growth is projected to be in the Asia Pacific region, from industries such as financial services and healthcare.
And this need for software is likely to gain pace. According to IDC, most enterprises are accelerating their spend on DX initiatives that will position them for recovery, to the extent that nearly two-thirds of the global economy is going to be digitally-based by the end of this year. So while it took 40 years to create the first half billion apps, the same analyst house predicts that it’ll take only five years to create the next half billion.
Market disruption
The challenge is that ISVs too are facing disruption.
For ISVs to be agile and be able to scale quickly, they also need to tap into the cloud and everything delivered as-a-service. But there are considerations for moving applications to the cloud. The key is choosing the right infrastructure to address all the challenges as they move ahead in their digital transformation journey.
Top 10 cloud requirements checklist
So what should ISVs look for from the cloud?
- They need a world class cloud: Many of the mission critical applications on which businesses depend need enterprise grade performance, scale and security. This is not easy to deliver on a standard public cloud. The benefit of this is clear, as Prashant Muddu, Managing Director and CEO at Jocata - an India-based digital transformation partner of choice for leading financial institutions around the world – who is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) shared, “We process nine billion transactions for 400 million customers. We have to be able to extract that data, run complex rules, create risk profiles, and complete a network analysis. All of this has to be done quickly. Having a cloud that delivers true enterprise class performance meant performance improved by more than 40%”
- They need a worldwide platform: With issues like data sovereignty and the desire, by many organisations, to keep their data close, if not onshore, there is the need to look at any vendor’s cloud footprint to ensure it is as close to customers as possible
- Industry leading price performance and predictable pricing, and flexible consumption models are key to enabling ISVs to confidently manage their cloud investment and growth strategies as their applications scale. Manish Kumar, Co-Founder and Product Head at Impartus - a video-based learning platform for both students and lecturers in India said, “During Covid-19, we witnessed exponential growth in our virtual classroom offering, with around 500TB outbound traffic, which meant large networking egress costs with our previous cloud service provider. By moving to OCI we were able to realise 40% cost savings as well as improved performance for our applications”
- With concerns about data theft and data privacy across the globe being at an all-time high, a secure platform underpinned by a zero-trust security architecture is critical to ensure their customers they can rest assure their sensitive data is protected from both external and internal threats
- Comprehensive Service Level Agreements are critical. After all, the commitments made to customers can only be as good as the commitment made by the cloud vendor
- The cloud platform should be able to help the ISVs reduce complexity with things like autonomous data platforms, driving down administrative costs and requirements, effectively lowering the overall costs of delivery
- They need a cloud provider that continuously invests and delivers the latest technologies and that delivers them in a way that makes them much easier to adopt and use. This includes AI, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, chatbots – even augmented reality. These need not only to be fully featured but ideally built-in or integrated into the cloud Infrastructure and easy to roll out. Additionally, there should be a good range of software development tools that need to be friction-free. Founder and CEO at Disrptiv Exchange Jiten Pitkar noted: “Our team consistently releases new functions and services to meet the unprecedented demands of thousands of customers. OCI offers us the flexibility to scale the costs in proportion to the increasing user base”
- Ideally, it should be an open platform, which avoids lock in and is easy to migrate to. Steve Challans, Chief Information Security Officer at Prophecy International highlighted: “During Covid-19, we migrated some of our key SaaS-based solutions from other cloud providers to OCI. It has given us the capability to scale and more precisely, configure the platform requirements particularly with the e3 type instances that we use so we can scale up and scale down systems to suit the appropriate workload”
- There needs to be support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud options, enabling companies to adhere to data residency standards, and overcome latency issues.
- Finally, in addition to these cloud requirements, the provider needs to be one who will enable them to build for the future, get to market and sell. Marcelo Scalia, Partner – Consulting and Robert Loughnane, Partner – Consulting (APAC) at Deloitte said: “Choosing the right cloud to host Deloitte Match Cloud not just allowed us to leverage the technology, speed, and scale of OCI but also the opportunity to productise and accelerate our expertise in several industries to build an accelerated solution like Match Cloud, our automated, cloud-based data quality and insights solution, to address specific data challenges and solve problems that customers might not even realise they're going to encounter.”