By: Sachin Nade, Solutions Director, LTI

​So Digital Transformation is the need of the hour with Cloud, Mobility, Social, Analytics and IoT solutions changing the outlook of IT, as the Change agents in organizations.​​

Organizations that are not adopting digital transformation will lose competitive advantage. At times, it may feel like a hype, as all you hear from Software and System Integrator partners these days is, “Digital”. However, there are tangible benefits that organizations are reaping out of them. Some of the offerings such as www.Coupa.com are assuring customers measurable monetary benefits with their Cloud Solution.

So I heard from some of my customers that they want to push out their JDE Upgrade decision until they wait, and see how Cloud is going to pan out before they embark on an Upgrade journey.

Whether you should upgrade your ERP first, or should be migrate your Infra/Platform to Cloud, could be a debate internally for you. The simple answer to the debate is to do a cost benefit analysis of both initiatives, and pick the right sequence; and the answer could still be different for each customer. Many clients are unaware about the activities, resources, constraints, challenges in a Cloud journey. However, at the same time, most of them are not up to speed on the Innovations in ​Upgrade lifecycle.

Leading IT services and solutions providers make sure that their clients get maximum ROI, so they can re-invest their returns for future initiatives. They use tools like Cloud Decision Scorecard, which can be completed in minutes remotely on end v/s Detail Cost Benefit Analysis, which may need a workshop. While the activities, challenges and resources for migrating the IaaS/PaaS are necessary, there is need for good understanding of various aspects of scalability, security, performance, load, integrations, to enable the migration to public, private or hybrid cloud. Also, other factors like migrating Test environment or Production environment, may add to it as well.

On the other hand, the Upgrade methodology has also evolved. While it is still not as easy as upgrading your OS on your phone, there are many improvements, which are leading us in that direction. Example: Oracle has simplified the JDE Upgrade from E1 9.2 onwards, where the customizations are not overridden for programs which are not enhanced. This reduces the retrofit scope for the Upgrade Project. LTI has created a unique solution to automatically retrofit objects, so you don’t need to manually retrofit these objects. This results in 60-80% reduction of retrofit efforts.

Moreover, there are other solutions available which automate the Testing, Package Build and Deploy, Perform Quality review of code, which further makes the upgrade more appealing.