“Always start with architecture.” So said a CIO I worked for at a life sciences company as we consolidated and replaced numerous legacy business applications and information silos. It was the late 1990s. That was the peak of the “business process reengineering” (BPR) movement championed by Harvard professor Michael Hammer and James Champy in their best-selling business book, Reengineering the Corporation, that I mentioned in a previous post.

Many IT leaders in that era were reengineering to standardize and simplify end-to-end business processes, often for the business purposes of decreasing costs and adopting new revenue-driving business innovations (such as e-commerce). Does that sound familiar in today’s business environment? By “obliterating” needless steps, in Hammer’s view, the stage was set to migrate from departmental to enterprise systems – such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

There are modern parallels as IT and business leaders plan their moves today from legacy on premises core business applications to cloud options. The transition is going to take time. As Larry Ellison said in his Oracle OpenWorld 2015 keynote,

A kind of coexistence is going to be common as enterprises move from ad-hoc, departmental cloud deployment to enterprise-wide cloud applications adoption.

Let’s revisit the idea of starting with the architecture. You may be familiar with the concept of a reference model. It is a conceptual framework for understanding the key entities and relationships as customers move more core business applications from on premises to the cloud. The key characteristic of a hybrid cloud reference model is that it describes a “mix and match” range of deployment options and factors.

In this Reference Model, courtesy of Rick Beers of Making IT Real, the starting point that describes the present reality for most Quest members is the On Premises layer, powered by JD Edwards or PeopleSoft.

The next layer downward in our model is IaaS. In this option customers move JD Edwards or PeopleSoft environments from customer equipment running in an on premises datacenter to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The move could encompass all environments (“lift and shift”), or might be used only for frequently-reconfigured development and test environments. The infrastructure services provide networking, computing, and storage hardware and software, as well as operations services. Oracle happens to offer those services via the Oracle Compute IaaS services. Another Oracle option is the Oracle Cloud Machine, where infrastructure services are powered by a dedicated machine placed in the corporate data center. JD Edwards and PeopleSoft offer system management tools to help with migration and operations management.

The next layer upward in our model is PaaS. In this option customers extend the JD Edwards or PeopleSoft environments with the capabilities of Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS is an alternative to deploying and maintaining on premises middleware. For example, Integration services connect on premises JD Edwards or PeopleSoft to other enterprise information systems. Additionally, PaaS adds services for mobility, identity management (including multi-system single sign-on), content management, and multi-system business process management.

The final layer upward in our model is SaaS, the most widely known cloud option. In this option, customers migrate or augment some of their JD Edwards or PeopleSoft business functions with cloud applications such as sales management or HR/HCM management. This option is somewhat analogous to “best of breed” options in previous eras of enterprise automation. Furthermore, this layer is commonly viewed as providing the agility and rapid ROI needed for enabling “asynchronous change” at the less than enterprise-wide scope – startup operations, departmental innovations, and mergers/acquisitions.

What’s the Point?

By understanding the architecture options, a reference model helps you consider the possibilities and implications for applying business technology to evolving business needs:

• Migrating enterprise applications platforms from ERP-centric to business-centric architectures
• Applying business technology to support business innovation
• Enabling asynchronous change