Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

A few years ago, there was a saying in corporate circles that "now is not the time to discuss whether or not to go to the cloud, but 'when? how? which cloud?" Today, these three problems are still the confusion of enterprises, but fortunately, after several years of precipitation, we have seen more and more successful cases of enterprises on the cloud.

As a strong cloud manufacturer, Microsoft's investment in China is not to be underestimated. On October 24, 2018, Microsoft Technology and Ecology Conference officially announced that "Dynamics 365Enterprise Application Cloud platform plans to land in China in the spring of 2019". At that time, Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, Office 365cloud productivity platform, Dynamics 365enterprise application cloud platform will gather in the Chinese market, and the "3 × 3 × 3" cloud strategic layout will be formed.

What is meant by "3 × 3 × 3"? According to Microsoft, the first "3" refers to Microsoft's vertical "three clouds", that is, the most comprehensive public cloud services covering IaaS,PaaS and SaaS platforms are all landed in China; the second "3" is horizontal "three clouds": private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud; and the third "3" is Microsoft's three clouds: Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365.

For companies distressed by Shangyun, Microsoft's smart cloud market share, technology precipitation and investment in the Chinese market are attractive enough. But enterprises on the cloud is not a pat on the head can decide, the migration process is bound to encounter a lot of problems, how to evaluate, how to implement, whether the results meet the expectations …...

Recently, the author interviewed the executives of three companies at the Microsoft Technology and Ecology Conference, and they generously shared their company's experience in the cloud, hoping that their experience can inspire enterprises with cloud needs.

Zhang Zhi, Chief data Officer of time China Holdings Limited

Liu Hu, Chief Technical Officer of China Building Materials Information Co., Ltd.

Zhou Qingming, Dravie Greater China partner

1. The original intention of Shangyun

Each enterprise wants to go to the cloud must be related to its own enterprise development strategy, business challenges, but the actual situation of each company, the difficulties encountered are not the same. The original intention of China Building Materials to go to the cloud is because of its business characteristics. It is reported that the annual turnover of China Building Materials is about 10 billion, all running on ERP, and the business characteristics of the company also determine the great difference between the peaks and troughs of the system.

According to Liu Hu, in terms of peaks and troughs throughout the year, it is about "1234", 10% in the first quarter and 40% in the last quarter, but in the last two years, it rose to 50% in the fourth quarter. The monthly distribution in each quarter is also different, and the business volume in the last month can account for 60% of the quarter, especially in the last few days of the sprint, where many documents are pressed here, with a large amount of concurrency and high requirements for the system. What is more fatal is that the company does not allow people to allocate resources according to the peak of all the information.

For time China, the original intention of Shangyun is that its own IT strategy is to realize the three modernizations, that is, informatization, digitalization and intelligence. In the transformation of these three modernizations, there is a core point, that is, to make the entire infrastructure and solutions flexible and agile as soon as possible. So Shangyun is completely in accordance with the strategic development direction of China of the times.

And Dreyway itself is a "moving" company, responsible for helping enterprises move apps to the cloud, in other words, Dreyway himself is "eating the bowl of rice from the cloud."

To sum up, although the three companies want to go to the cloud for different reasons, in the final analysis, it is the existing business and environment that are driving them to move to the cloud.

two。 Evaluation consideration

After defining the goal of Shangyun, the next step is to evaluate the major cloud manufacturers and select the one that is most suitable for them. Because of the different original intentions of Shangyun, the three companies will also focus on the evaluation criteria when choosing.

There are three evaluation criteria for time China:

Can the products provided by cloud manufacturers meet the requirements in terms of function?

Does the cloud vendor's entire strategic roadmap match the company's technology development strategic planning?

Because the time node of the whole project is very tight, it is expected that the whole project can be launched in a very short time.

There are also three criteria for the evaluation of building materials in China:

Whether it can solve the problem of peaks and troughs.

Whether it can greatly save hardware equipment resources.

Platform maturity

The first two companies choose more from their own business development, while Dreyway has a different starting point in choosing to cooperate with Microsoft on SAP because of the different nature of the enterprise. Zhou Qingming revealed that Dreyway himself has strong experience in SAP, and the architecture of the entire Azure technology platform is very perfect. We cooperated with the Microsoft team two or three years ago, and the two sides communicated smoothly, and it was reasonable to cooperate again.

3. Implementation process

Compared with the imagined complex and tedious implementation process, the implementation process of the three companies is surprisingly simple and smooth, and the pre-research experiment may take more time, but the real migration can be completed in almost two weeks.

Because China Building Materials itself is a partner of Microsoft and SAP, their technical team has experimented repeatedly in their own laboratory before deciding to launch the production environment, so the overall implementation process is relatively smooth, and the real problem lies in the combination of SAP implementation and its business.

While the implementation of time China is realized by the original SAP factory, SAP engineers are more inclined to local deployment at the beginning, but time China insists on going to the cloud because of its own strategic development, so the two sides have some collisions in this respect, but based on the mutual certification solution, the problem has been easily solved. Zhang Zhi revealed that the implementation of the entire Hybris e-commerce in time China, including the research and implementation of SAP, took a total of 3 months, while the real deployment on Azure took more than two weeks.

Zhou Qingming, a partner in Dreyway Greater China, interpreted the implementation process of customer migration from a technical point of view. The average customer will have three sets of systems for development, production and verification. At the beginning, it takes 1-2 weeks to do the verification, get the development over, this takes 2 weeks, and another week to do the ecosystem verification, and then officially migrate. Two things are involved in the migration process, one is the amount of data, and the other is the user's geographical location. If it is a pure relocation, it will be very soon, and it will end smoothly in two months.

4. Cost change

It is true that the enterprise migration to the cloud is to solve the current business dilemma, but cost saving is also an important reason that can not be ignored. Costs can be divided into two types, one is explicit costs, such as hardware, and the other is implicit costs, in which the savings of explicit costs are more intuitive, while the savings of implicit costs can bring greater value.

Time China revealed that it has made a cost comparison when choosing SAP on Azure. In terms of 3-5 years of TCO, using Azure solution alone can achieve about 30% savings in hardware deployment, which does not take into account operating costs. You should know that the labor cost savings are higher.

China Building Materials said that in terms of cost, our company is depreciated for five years. From the perspective of asset purchase and lease, the results of our budget and actual practice have proved that we need to save about 40% in hardware procurement because of the company's business characteristics. if you want to fully meet the peak period of applications, you need to buy very high-end machines using hardware and hosting. On the other hand, there is savings in operating costs. Our company's business is growing rapidly. In the past, the maintenance of the computer room required three or two people. According to the division of labor at that time, the current situation requires almost 10 people to maintain the data center. But after going to the cloud, the actual situation now is that only one person is maintaining it, and it is not full-time yet.

Write at the end

Both time China and China Building Materials have given positive comments on the effect after going to the cloud. Liu Hu said, "the system has been very stable since its operation, and there has never been much fluctuation in efficiency." and it is also very stable in terms of network maintenance. "

There is another news worthy of your attention. Azure officially offers M-series virtual machines in China. It is currently the widest range of HANA production environments (7 kinds), largest memory (up to 4TB per node) and supporting SAP HANA virtual machines in the public cloud market, which can provide comprehensive SAP On Azure solutions and services for the Chinese market.

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