Oftentimes, companies on the last mile of their overall cloud journey encounter some resistance from cloud-stubborn legacy applications.
Skytap makes that migration process easier.
Shelby Skrhak speaks with
Jon Schrader, SVP of Sales and Customer Success at
Skytap, about:
- The company mission of Skytap
- Why customers want to migrate legacy systems
- Challenges that exist
- How Skytap makes the process easier
Skytap’s mission
Skytap has been around for close to 14 years, and historically, it’s been one of the largest multitenant cloud providers for VMware-based workloads.
In recent years, however, the company’s mission has evolved. Today, they are focused on helping customers move legacy applications that have been anchored in the data center for decades into the cloud.
Why migrate legacy systems
According to Jon, there are three things driving this desire:
- Exit the data center: As customers get further along their cloud journey, they want the full cost savings on their on-prem resources.
- Modernization: On-prem applications don’t have access to full cloud-native resources.
- Adopt modern development principles: Customers are looking to leverage new and unique capabilities around legacy and traditional applications.
Migration challenges
Migrating legacy applications can be challenging for various reasons.
Sometimes, the people managing power systems and legacy applications are different from the people managing cloud adoption. That results in gaps in expertise and resourcing. Because of that, it requires heavy investments into enablement.
Another challenge is that many applications that are legacy from the ground up aren’t meant to be portable.
How Skytap helps
Skytap has a product that makes the migration challenge easier.
“We’re the only cloud provider that allows you to run x86 and power-based components directly together in a single pane of glass for management purposes,” Jon says.
That enables the ability to handle a lot of complexity and bolster existing network schema that traditionally aren’t natively supported.
Plus, Skytap has built up a significant amount of IP around migration practice and policy and fostered a large amount of relationships with third-party technology companies that support replication and backup and restore processes.
“When you can be given a path to natively support those applications in the cloud,” Jon says, “then you're given the ability to create more modern process around it, and you're given the ability to embed more modern technology around the perimeter of it without having to take the risk of trying to rewrite the systems that are running your business.”
Partner community
Skytap represents a net-new workload for partners.
“This is a new offering where they can build a cloud capability and a cloud practice around migrating applications that they already have first right of refusal to,” Jon says. “So, it opens up the portfolio.”
Plus, it’s offering a path toward retaining the investment.
“From a partner’s perspective, it becomes an annuity stream,” Jon says.
The market for this is massive, which is one of the reasons Skytap has made such a strong play into it.
Contact
IBM Cloud Sales Mailbox or visit
Skytap for more information.
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