siliconindia | | May 20178TO CLOUD OR NOT TO CLOUD: NO LONGER A QUESTIONBy Dilipkumar Khandelwal, MD, SAP Labs India and EVP, Enterprise Cloud Services, SAP SEHow to Cloud is a more pertinent questionAnalysts confirm that the worldwide cloud computing market leaped by 28 percent to 110B USD in revenues in 2015, a clear validation of its rapid growth. While going the cloud way is no longer a topic for debate and delib-eration, CIO's across enterprises have to deal with chal-lenges while implementing the various cloud propositions they can choose from. Presently, the most favored cloud software option for the Enterprises is Software as a Service (SaaS) and hence it's rapid growth. By 2020 the expected penetration of software as a service (SaaS) versus traditional software deployment is over 25 percent. Customers adore this mod-el as it gives them freedom from hardware management, associated upgrades and software life cycle problems. In simple words, the customer needs only an internet con-nection for the solution to work. On purchase of subscrip-tion, the enterprise gets user logins through which users can access the application after system configuration.The beauty of this model is in the simplicity of imple-mentation and use. Business configurations are simple as most of it is taken care of by application of best practices. This results in minimum implementation times and faster go-lives. However, the model comes with its own chal-lenges. The simplicity of implementation creates a lack of flexibility which many of the customers demand owing to variation in operating models. Today, the best of SaaS providers face challenges related to extensibility and cus-tomer specific enhancements which limit the scalability of complex business critical applications for large business-es. This is a gap that the software providers are working on at a war-like pace because SaaS is the sweet spot that customers aim for. The systems are evolving rapidly and it is just a matter of time that the problems are overcome and it becomes a default choice of all businesses.IN MY OPINIONSAP (NYSE: SAP) is a market leader in enterprise application software that enables more than 310,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably.Dilipkumar Khandelwal
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