Yes - I did say faster twice...

The below article is written from a personal perspective, any opinions herein are expressly my own.

Why enterprises aren’t accelerating their digital transformation and cloud adoption?

It’s a good question to ponder on isn’t it - you may even say… “you are wrong, they are accelerating, just look at the size of the public cloud market…it grew 41.4% in 2021 and is currently sitting at ~$91bn”.?

Nearly all of the major enterprise businesses out there have a digital transformation objective, however not all of them are achieving this lofty goal. They are making good headway with smaller self built applications when responding to new market demands. However, you may be surprised to hear, a lot of the major businesses still haven’t been able to lift themselves off their mainframes.?

There is an argument to say, if it ain't broke, dont fix it and if 70% of all Fortune 500 companies rely on mainframes for critical computing , surely disrupting that critical system is going to create more of a risk than potential benefit.

In my experience - it’s not the potential risk that is holding these businesses back, afterall risk can be mitigated and this is why we have giant testing teams who are experts in any particular critical system. It is more to do with the complexity of the data models and schemas that these major businesses have accumulated over time, more on that later.?

There are tangible benefits which should be obvious when considering modernising applications, leveraging microservices and moving to consumption based infrastructure cost model.?

Consider:?

• Smaller specialized development teams working closer together on their particular microservice, operating in any number of delivery methodologies - Agile, Lean Six Sigma, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean….
• Speeding up time to market, increasing the release frequency, decoupling services for hot (zero downtime) releases and upgrades.
• The age-old CapEx vs OpEx model - I personally don’t feel that businesses should really worry too much about this - consumption based OpEx model is almost always more beneficial. Yes there are scenarios where businesses need to treat infrastructure cost as CapEx, (there are ways of doing this through commits (EAs, EDPs etc), but don’t limit yourself as the business direction may change and how quickly you can get to an OpEx model is worth bearing in mind. I also wouldn’t suggest moving out of a freshly commissioned DC within the last 2-3 years, unless you can work out the resale value (including the tin housed within) and the time to nett the difference back.?
• ?Paying for what you use, no longer needing to pay for unused capacity based on seasonality of your business, it has to be a positive outcome for your bottom line - albeit may not be immediate.?

Now - again, come back to the initial question - why….why aren’t all these enterprises accelerating their digital transformation across the board, why aren’t they investing in microservices and public cloud in a big way - after all, project managers, program managers, product owners, developers, software engineers, CFOs, CEOs, COOs all want it to happen, they want the benefits, they want faster time to market, they want to be able to react to the regulatory landscape, they want to leverage the cost benefits of a consumption model, ultimately they want to ensure that they are not losing out to the young upstarts that are born this way, in the cloud, building on microservices etc.?

The Answer - it’s bloody hard!! Why is it hard…largely down to the data models these businesses have. Relational databases require complex data models and schemas that map out exactly where the data resides and the dependencies of that data ahead of even getting to a planning session to architect any application modernisation. This is down to the amount of tables these businesses have and when you throw in acquisitions and plugging legacy on legacy application stacks the complexity simply is exponential. Throw onto this a Structured Query Language that is ~60 years old (in the same time frame the Wright brothers first flew a plane and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon! - Neil and Buzz would have struggled in the Wright Flyer) ….it’s time to think again.?

Ask yourself, if we can move away from relational databases, complex schemas and object relational mapping layers? If we can use a database platform that is intuitive for developers? to work with and get straight into actually how the application will work rather than thinking about data models from the start? If the database platform is geographically resilient, self heals and is portable across all clouds? What would that do for my business?

I sincerely hope you come to the conclusion that:

1. You will have happier developers doing what they love - being creative builders.
2. You will get faster applications to market faster - yes, I did day faster twice and I mean it.
3. You will be able to genuinely achieve the goals of a digital transformation and build modern applications on a modern database platform.?
4. You won’t be subject to vendor lock in.

A great example for this is Bendigo and Adelaide bank who realised their current RDBMS was holding them back - a move to MongoDB enabled them to realise their vision of a true digital transformation.?

It’s only the start for them too - they now have all the tools of a modern data platform to go ahead and put more of the exciting ideas into practice.