As starts go, it’s been a good one. The reaction to our first issue has been inspiring and everyone at ERP Today is very grateful for the kind words and encouragement. We know we have a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we certainly won’t be resting on our laurels, but so far so good. Our team is growing, the list of partners we are working with is expanding, and the number of CXOs subscribing has been incredible. Who said print was dead?
A lot of people have asked how is the best way to engage with us? We are still a very small team and although we have established lots of connections already, we rely on our contributors, advertisers and partners being proactive. If you have a great idea for an article, would like to see your organisation featured, or have a partnership idea, say hello and tell us your story.
We announced our awards initiative at our launch event and the response has been exceptional. We have already secured partnerships with a dozen leading brands and we can barely contain our excitement to announce the guest of honour, compère, and entertainment. The event will be a showcase for purpose-led innovation with a strong emphasis on young talent and customers. The awards will recognise excellence across the three pillars of the economy, the environment and society and will be the only truly independent recognition of merit within the sector.
It’s been a busy few months for acquisitions, mergers and partnerships; IBM, Salesforce and Google have all snapped up targets; EQT’s acquisition of Acumatica puts them in the same stable as IFS; Oracle and Microsoft have become friends (at least their cloud divisions have); and NTT has merged all its businesses into one giant entity to enhance its position in the enterprise transformation market
There have been many others too and they all have one thing in common; the next generation of the cloud revolution. The first phase, which started almost 20 years ago, and has been in full swing for the last decade, was all about taking the tech we already had and putting it in some sort of cloud. Most of it wasn’t, and still isn’t, true cloud but the idea was simple enough and we all got on board. Applications, databases, and workloads are run on infrastructure that someone else maintains – the server room was a thing of the past and we all got used to thinking remotely rather than locally.
As we enter the second phase of the cloud era, the hybrid cloud era, we are now thinking about smarter, more secure, and less risky ways to deploy cloud technologies and better ways to derive meaningful insights from the data we capture. I expect to see no let-up in marriages of convenience between cloud vendors and analytics companies as they race to capture the business of savvy CIOs who don’t want all their eggs in one basket and demand more value from their data.
Paul
