Business Chief April 2019

Powering digital transformation with
a Business-Driven Roadmap
By Glenn Cahaly
I spend most of my time talking to
Oracle and SAP customers and the
conversation is essentially the
same these days:
“To change the game, our company needs to put users
first and technology second. The good news: Our leadership
team has identified what we need to compete and grow the
business, and we understand the IT initiatives required. The
bad news: we have very little capacity for innovation because
we spend the majority of our budget and time on vendordictated
ERP roadmaps, which can include risky updates,
costly upgrades and rip-and-replace projects to move to
their cloud solutions prematurely.”
Whether you are a CFO, a CIO, an IT leader, Procurement or
IT Asset Manager, these words probably sound familiar. The
vendor’s product roadmap should be an input into your
strategy; it shouldn’t be your strategy. Yet ERP applications
are such an important component of the IT you use to run
your business that it can be easy to fall into the pattern of
letting your vendor call the shots. If you don’t upgrade, you
can fall out of compliance. And regardless of how much you
pay, you get progressively less value from each upgrade. All
the while, the vendor is shifting its R&D investments away
from the products it sold you and giving you seemingly no
option but to continue to move. Unlike a vendor-dictated
approach, a Business-Driven Roadmap starts with an
organization's 3-to-5 year business strategy and then
defines the game-changing IT initiatives that will support it.
Rimini Street accelerates clients' to adopt a Business-Driven
Roadmap strategy by providing capacity that accelerates
their ability to innovate and reduces vendor lock-in, allows
them the flexibility to design a roadmap based on their
unique requirements, and provides the agility to take an
orchestrated approach to their technology strategy. When
clients move to a Business-Driven Roadmap approach
powered by Rimini Street, they are liberated from the
vendor-dictated roadmap and enabled to take control of
their IT destiny and future-proof their investment to
accommodate continuous change.
Get your free roadmap
assessment today
Learn More
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Gartner - “IT Key Metrics Data 2018: Executive Summary” December 11, 2017
Free up IT capacity: According to Gartner 1 , as
much as 90percent of the IT budget goes to
ongoing operations (“keeping the lights on”).
That leaves a measly 10percent to invest in
game- changing initiatives. Organizations
becoming trapped in an endless cycle of enterprise software
upgrades is a big reason why. If you’ve customized your ERP
and integrated it with other software, you don’t dare upgrade
without extensive testing. Free yourself from this busywork,
and you can get back to making technology investments
that make a difference.
Extend the lifespan of existing investments:
Most enterprises have spent years implementing,
integrating and customizing their ERP to meet
business needs — only to have their vendors tell them it’s
time to abandon all that in favor of a “new and improved”
but immature platform. Vendors want to establish new
revenue streams and reposition themselves for the cloud.
That roadmap serves vendors’ needs, not those of enterprises
seeking to build on investments they have already made.
That’s why you need a Business-Driven Roadmap approach
that includes third-party support for your ERP.
Innovate with flexibility: Cloud computing
should give you more options, not fewer.
Your ERP vendor has a roadmap to take you
to the cloud — specifically, to its proprietary
corner of the cloud. Fortunately for those wary of even
deeper vendor lock-in, open cloud options exist to improve
the cost and performance of your ERP operations while
keeping you in control. You won’t find many on the vendor’s
technology roadmap; you need to follow your own and we
can help you get there.
Design with your future enterprise in mind:
How are you rationalizing your software
decisions? You won’t find the answer exclusively
on one vendor’s roadmap, unless you’re
convinced it has the best product in every category.
Born-in-the cloud software represents some of the greatest
innovations in enterprise technology. The best of them come
with APIs that allow you to connect them to other APIs and to
your installed base of software. Rather than struggling with
laborious integrations, you have the opportunity to
orchestrate software around the use cases that matter
most to your business.
Learn why over 2,600 clients chose Rimini Street’s ultraresponsive
service, breaking free from the burden of vendor
support so they can focus IT resources on initiatives that
support their Business-Driven Roadmap strategy.
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