Maximum Verstappen

For Formula 1’s sake: winning races earns you points. The driver – and team – with the most points at the end of the season, wins the championship. Which is of course the end goal. In other words, winning the race is the most important thing. However, there is one extra championship point for the pilot who drives the fastest lap in the race. And with a couple of laps to go, Max Verstappen did not have the fastest lap to his name. To get a shot at driving the fastest lap, he needed to get new tires, forcing him to do a pit stop. Which additionally imposed an extra risk if something went wrong, and he would loose additional time.

Furthermore, he also needed to take more risk on the track to get the fastest lap done. The rational thing to do would be to forget about the one extra point and just bring in the win. But as you can guess, Verstappen drove in against his team’s advice and went for the pits to get new tires and a shot at the fastest lap.

When it comes to transforming your business to the cloud, be rational too. cloud vendors often advise you to take every existing application and workload you currently run on-premises and put it in the cloud. It is called application rationalisation.

We rather recommend being rational about application rationalisation.  Pretty much like the Redbull race engineer who tried to convince Max to do the rational thing: bring the car home, win the race, think about the bigger picture and forget about the extra point. You do not need to take everything possible, go for what is necessary in the long run.

The enterprise application landscape: where do you start?

In large enterprises the application landscape is most often very complex.  A lot of different applications are linked to multiple data sources, grown over many years and in doing so, forming a digital jungle no one ever profoundly sets foot in.  Sometimes the developers are no longer there, sometimes the source code might even be lost.  And although there are tools on the market that offer an automated scan to analyse the application landscape, we have not seen many success stories with these in a real enterprise environment. Which leads us to problem number one: where do we even start from? 

Even if a solid application portfolio management is in place, the current application owner might not have the knowledge of how it all links together.  At this point, the application landscape becomes a game of Jenga:  if you take one application out to re-architect it, what other applications might fall over?

Rational application rationalisation

The early days cloud-promise that moving everything to the cloud would be cheaper is by now rather doubtful, to say the least.  Meaning that a massive lift-and- shift effort will not result in a cheaper outcome.  

And so, much like Redbull’s race engineer pointed out: be reluctant about taking everything and most and foremost, be rational about application rationalisation. A few tips how to might be in place.

Go for the quick wins

Driving accelerated cloud adoption will go much faster, smoother and more efficient by focussing on quick wins. It’s very hard to convince a business division of a big investment in migrating their existing application to a cloud platform. To start, the cost and the effort is significant, while the return on investment is often unclear. cloud powered innovation using AI, data solutions, cognitive services, low-code new application, and more like these regularly have a much higher business value. And that will motivate the business to get behind cloud adoption. The result is indeed a hybrid platform for a longer period of time. Which needs to be managed from a lot of different angles. cloud adoption is never a goal in itself, but a means to something else. By focussing on quick wins that is exactly what you are doing.

Invest in innovation

From a functional point of view, it is beneficial to focus on innovative solutions rather than migrating existing workloads.  Not all these innovative projects are quick wins.  Some can be real significant journeys.  Often, the result of defining this type of roadmaps will lead to decommissioning old applications anyway.  Which makes it a double win: the innovation drives business value and the old application no longer needs to be migrated since it will no longer be used.

Do not ignore SaaS solutions

While SaaS solutions are not always the magic bullet, the good old make-or-buy got a new flavour in the cloud world in the meantime. Independent software vendors still have some way to go when it comes to getting their application SaaS ready. But we do see more and more off-the-shelf SaaS solutions that offer fast business value. It is important as an IT (platform) team to get involved in these conversations right from the start. Do not wait to engage until the business asks if your team could quickly do a Single Sign On integration.

Check the actual usage of old applications

It might sound trivial, but it is a legit and common cost: invest in validating the real usage of applications.  It’s flabbergasting how often applications can be decommissioned based on this common-sense screening.  We have been in a situation where ten people in one division are still using an old application, while 100 colleagues in other divisions had already migrated to a new solution. No need to say that this is inefficient and costly behaviour.

Do it step-by-step

Finally, do not do a big bang all-in-one migration.  We have seen situations where even the compelling event of closing down a datacenter did not bring the anticipated eagerness for a full cloud migration.  It is all about business value, not about what IT thinks makes most sense. Keep this perspective in mind when transforming your application landscape and take it step by step.

In essence, Max Verstappen’s decision during the Austrian Grand Prix to pit for new tires and secure the fastest lap, despite leading comfortably, mirrors the cautionary tale offered in the realm of application rationalisation.

The analogy extends to the complexities faced in large enterprises, where the tangled web of interconnected applications resembles a precarious game of Jenga. The call for rationality in application rationalisation urges organisations to carefully assess their application landscapes, emphasising the importance of starting with a clear understanding of where to begin. The recommendation to focus on quick wins aligns with the strategy of driving accelerated cloud adoption through showcasing tangible benefits, particularly in innovative solutions that bring immediate business value.

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