Listen to my conversation with Jon Pyke, Founder and CEO of CIMTrek, which provides tools to migrate legacy applications to cloud platforms.
In this podcast, learn why some collaborative applications are holding organisations back from adopting the cloud, and find out some of the possible approaches to migrating groupware-based applications to a cloud platform.
Listen to or download the 7:15 minute podcast below:
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PW: Jon, you recently founded and launched CIMTrek. Give us a brief overview of the reasons for this new venture and what it does.
JP: Well, I'd been spending some time last year writing a book with a couple of colleagues, Peter Fingar and Andy Mulholland. And one of the things — one of the recurring themes that came up when we were doing the research, was that there were so many occasions when people seemed to be assuming that anything to do with the cloud was a green-field site. And I started to question this. I thought, well actually, probably one of the biggest impediments to organizations moving to the cloud is the stuff they've already got. And I'm not talking about the big SAP- and ERP-, Oracle-type systems. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking more about the groupware legacy applications, in that space.
And I thought that if we're going to get businesses to move to the cloud, then we ought to be able to, not just move their mail addresses and directories, but you ought to be able to move the applications they use on an everyday basis. And it's those simple applications — like room booking, and expenses, and simple CRM — those sort of things. So I thought if we could move those across into a cloud platform then there would be less resistance to move into it.
Right. And so these are the collaborative applications that people are typically using in workgroups. They might be built on Lotus Notes, or Microsoft Access, Novell Groupware, or whatever I guess.
Yeah absolutely, and particularly Notes and Groupware I think. If you think back to the early nineties when we were all talking about CSCW — that's Computer Supported Collaborative Working — well, I think there's a new twist to that to become Cloud Supported Collaborative Working.
[laughter] So, one of the things that was going through my mind is, why don't businesses just carry on with what they've got? How important is it for them that these legacy applications don't have the cloud capabilities?
Well, it's an interesting question, but I think it comes down to cost and availability and being able to run these systems. Because up until now, — well, let's just backtrack a little bit. I was talking to a large organization very recently, and the amount of money they spend on keeping these types of applications going, it was just remarkable. They were spending something like nine million pounds a year to keep an organization using very simple end-user type applications, as I was mentioning before.
It seems to me if you can get rid of the ownership of that, and turn that money into being innovative and doing new things rather than trying to keep things going in the background. So it was very much a question of cost reduction, both from a people and a hardware environment. But also I think it's much greener to do it this way, rather than keeping all of these disks and machine rooms spinning away doing literally nothing most of the time.
Well, yes.
So much cost, I think.
So, is CIMTrek a complete platform, or do you work with other platforms when you migrate these applications into the cloud?
Well, what we do is, we mine those applications and turn what we find into common formats. So typically, a user would mine the Notes environment and then come back and tell you every single application you've got, how many forms you've got, how many views, and all that kind of stuff. Then we convert that into an internal common format, and then you select where you want it to go. So for instance, if you wanted to move it to a big workflow system like Pega, or Lombardi, or whatever, then you could do that. And then we would take the process across into that environment.
If you were looking at very simple applications, then we would move that onto the CIMTrek platform, which is a simple workflow tool. If you were migrating something like Notes Docs — the doc libraries within Notes — then you might just move those collaborative documents straight through into, say, Google Docs. So it's very like a one-to-many and it gives the users a choice as to where they want to put these applications, so they can pick the most appropriate environment in which to run them.
Yes, and I think that's important, isn't it? People are scratching their heads, thinking to themselves, well, how do I reduce the cost of keeping these old platforms running? How do I get away from spending all of my IT budget on just keeping the lights on? That's one part of the question. The other part of the question is, and how do I exploit these capabilities that I can see people getting in the cloud? — or being able to support remote working and dynamic teams, for example, much more easily — and mobile working as well.
What sort of factors do you think people are mostly going to want to take advantage of? Are you talking to enterprises that really want to take advantage of the cloud environment more, not just to save cost but also because of the new potential that's available there?
I think it's a combination of the two. And I'm hearing both parts of that equation depending on who I talk to, actually, within an organization. If I'm talking to some of the business users, the guys on the finance, they're very much interested in reducing costs and being able to deploy systems quicker and more easily than they could in the past. And if I talk to the guys in IT, then they're thinking, well, we need to move into this new environment to take advantage of these new capabilities. But there are so many factors that people are looking at which they just can't get to, in my opinion, until they move some of these apps into a more open and more expansive environment.
Yes, and of course, the integration to other platforms is also a consideration. You may well have, or want to have, integration with other existing applications that perhaps can't move quite so easily to the cloud. That's a consideration that people are going to have in mind as well.
That's very true. And one of the things we say to people is, this isn't always going to be one hundred percent migration. We give you an indication of how long it's going to take and whether it's going to be easy or hard. But at the end of the day, there's going to be those instances where we can't do all of the integration — or sometimes we can't do any of it. And then there is a requirement to bring in somebody to go the last mile, if you like, and finish off the migration. But also, what we find is, when people look at this, they think, 'Actually we can make our systems look much better very easily as well, just by putting new skins on the forms or HTML capabilities.' Although they're familiar with them, the systems suddenly look — they get a refresh as well very cheaply and very easily.
Right, and that of course can be very helpful from a productivity point of view as well, I imagine.
Yes, and the key to all of this is migration, so that the users are still familiar and still understand the applications they're using and the way they use them. Because we try and mirror very closely what they're doing right now. And then of course, the other key thing is, when they're doing it, they don't actually have to buy new software, it's all subscription based, so it's all operational expenses.
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