In a move that has sparked intense discussion across the enterprise software landscape, Klarna announced its decision to drop both Salesforce Sales Cloud and Workday, replacing these industry-leading platforms with its own AI-driven tools. This announcement, led by CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, may signal a paradigm shift toward using custom AI agents to manage critical business functions such as customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources (HR). While mostly social media fodder at this point, this very public bet on SaaS replacement has raised important questions about the future of enterprise software and how Agentic AI might reshape the way businesses operate.

AI Agents – Impact on Enterprises

Klarna’s move maybe be a one-off internal pivot or it may signal broader shifts that impact enterprises worldwide. Here are three ways this transition could affect the broader market:

1. Customized AI Over SaaS for Competitive Differentiation Enterprises are always on the lookout for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. Klarna’s decision may reflect an emerging trend: companies developing custom Agentic AI solutions to better tailor workflows and processes to their specific needs. The advantage here lies in having a system that is purpose-built for an organization’s unique requirements, potentially driving innovation and efficiencies that are difficult to achieve with out-of-the-box software. However, this approach also raises challenges. Building Agentic AI solutions in-house requires significant technical expertise, resources, and time. Not all companies will have the bandwidth to undertake such a transformation, but for those who do, it could become a key differentiator in terms of operational efficiency and personalized customer experiences.
2. Shift in Vendor Relationships and Power Dynamics If more enterprises follow Klarna’s lead, we could see a shift in the traditional vendor-client dynamic. For years, businesses have relied on SaaS providers like Salesforce and Workday to deliver highly specialized, integrated solutions. However, AI-driven automation might diminish the need for comprehensive, multi-purpose platforms. Instead, companies might lean towards modular, lightweight tech stacks powered by AI agents, allowing for greater control and flexibility. This shift could weaken the power and influence of SaaS providers if enterprises increasingly build customized systems in-house. On the other hand, it could also lead to new forms of partnership between AI providers and SaaS companies, where AI becomes a layer on top of existing systems rather than a full replacement.
3. Greater Focus on Data and Compliance Risks With AI agents handling sensitive business functions like customer management and HR, companies like Klarna must ensure that data governance, compliance, and security are up to the task. This shift toward Agentic AI requires robust mechanisms to manage customer and employee data, especially in industries with stringent regulatory requirements, like finance and healthcare. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, raised these concerns directly, questioning how Klarna will handle compliance, governance, and institutional memory. AI might automate many processes, but without the proper safeguards, it could introduce new risks that legacy SaaS providers have long addressed. Enterprises looking to follow Klarna’s example will need to rethink how they manage these critical issues within their AI-driven frameworks.

AI Agents – SaaS Vendors Respond

As enterprises explore the potential of Agentic AI-driven systems, SaaS providers like Salesforce and Workday must adapt to a new reality. Klarna’s decision could be the first domino in a broader shift, forcing these companies to reconsider their own offerings and strategies. Here are three possible responses we could see from the SaaS giants:

1. Doubling Down on AI Integration Salesforce and Workday are not standing still. In fact, both companies are already integrating AI into their platforms. Salesforce’s Einstein and the newly introduced Agentforce are examples of AI-powered tools designed to enhance customer interactions and automate tasks. We might see a rapid acceleration of these efforts, with SaaS providers emphasizing Agentic AI-driven features that keep businesses within their ecosystems rather than prompting them to build in-house solutions. However, as Benioff pointed out, the key might be blending AI with human oversight rather than replacing humans altogether. This hybrid approach will allow Salesforce and Workday to differentiate themselves from pure AI solutions by ensuring that critical human elements—like decision-making, customer empathy, and regulatory knowledge—are never lost.
2. Building Modular and Lightweight Offerings Klarna’s move underscores the desire for flexibility and control over tech stacks. In response, SaaS companies may offer more modular, API-driven solutions that allow enterprises to mix and match components based on their needs. This would enable businesses to take advantage of best-in-class SaaS features without being locked into a monolithic platform. By offering modular systems, Salesforce and Workday could cater to enterprises looking to integrate AI while maintaining the core advantages of established SaaS infrastructure—such as compliance, security, and data management.
3. Strengthening Data Governance and Compliance as Key Differentiators As AI grows in influence, data governance, compliance, and security will become critical battlegrounds for SaaS providers. SaaS companies like Salesforce and Workday have spent years building trusted systems that comply with various regulatory frameworks. Klarna’s AI approach will be closely scrutinized to ensure it meets these same standards, and any slip-ups could provide an opening for SaaS vendors to argue that their systems remain the gold standard for enterprise-grade compliance. By doubling down on their strengths in these areas, SaaS vendors could position themselves as the safer, more reliable option for enterprises that handle sensitive or regulated data. This approach could attract companies that are hesitant to take the AI plunge without fully understanding the risks.

What’s Next?

Klarna’s decision to replace SaaS platforms with a custom AI system may represent a significant shift in the enterprise software landscape. While this move highlights the growing potential of AI to reshape key business functions, it also raises important questions about governance, compliance, and the long-term role of SaaS providers. As organizations worldwide watch Klarna’s big bet play out, it’s clear that we are entering a new phase of enterprise software evolution—one where the balance between AI, human oversight, and SaaS will be critical to success.

Content Hub ONE developers did a great job in such a short time. However, from my point of view, there are a few issues that make it hard to use this platform in its current stage for commercial usage. Let’s take a look at them.

Content

• Part 1: Mastering Content
• Part 2: Developing Client App
• Part 3: Feedback and Afterthoughts

Feedback

1. Lack of official support for many in-demand media types other than four types of images is a big blocker. Especially given that there is no technical barrier to doing that in principle. Hopefully, that will sorted with time.

2. Many times while working with CH1 I got phantom errors, without understanding the cause. For example, I wanted to upload media but got Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'error') in return. Later, I realized that was caused by session expiration, which was not entirely clear. Also frustrating – I got these session issues even after just navigating the site as if navigation did not reset the session expiration timer. But since that is SaaS product – it’s only my guess without having access to internals.

3. Another issue experienced today was CH1 got down with UI showing me a failed to fetch error. That also occurred with my cloud-deployed head app which also failed to fetch content from CH1. Unannounced/planned maintenance?

1. Not being able to reference more than 10 other records limits platform usage. With my specific example, I had around 50 items of whisky to be exposed through this app but was able to include only max 10 of them. What is worse – there are no error messages around it or UI informing me about the limitation in any other way.

2. When playing around with the existing type I cannot change the field type, and that limitation is understood. The obvious solution would be deleting that field instead and regrating it with the same name but another type (let’s assume there’s no content to be affected). Sadly, that was not possible and ended with Failed entity definition saving with name: 'HC.C.collection' error. You can only recreate the field with a new name, not the same one you’ve just deleted. If you got lots of queries in your client code – you’ll need to locate them and update them correspondingly.

3. Not enough field types. For example, a URL could be simply placed into a small text field, but without proper validation, editors may end up having broken links if they put a faulty URL value on a page.

There is some UI/UX to be improved

1. Content Hub One demands more clicks for content modeling creation compared to let’s say XP. For example, if you publish a content item, related media does not get published automatically. You need manually click through media, locate it and publish explicitly. On large volumes of content, this adds unwanted labor.

2. To help with the above, it would make sense to add a publish menu item into the context menu upon an uploaded item in a draft state. That eliminates the extra step of clicking into the item for publishing.

1. On the big monitors the name of a record is mislocated in the top left corner making it unclear to edit it. Given that, it is not located with a form field, so not immediately obvious that is editable. That is especially important for records that are not possible to rename after creation. Bringing the name close to the other fields would definitely help!

1. Lack of drag&drop. It would be much easier to upload media by simply dragging the files onto a media listbox, or any other reasonable control.

2. Speaking about media, UI does not support selecting multiple files for an upload. Users have to click one after another.

3. Need better UI around grouping and managing assets. Currently, there are facets but need something more than that, maybe the ability to group records into folders. I don’t have a desired view on that, but definitely see the need for such a feature, as my ultra-simple demo case already requires navigational effort.

Conclusion

I don’t want to end with the criticism only leaving a negative impression about this product: there are plenty of positives as well. I would mention decent SDKs, attention to the details where the feature is actually implemented (like the order of referenced items follows up the order you select them), an excellent idea of a modern asynchronous UI powered with webhooks that can notify you about when the resource gets published to Edge (just needs to sort out the session expiration issues).

Content Hub One is definitely in the early stages of its career. I hope that the development team and product managers will eventually overcome this early stage of the product and deliver us a lightweight but reasonably powerful headless CMS that will speed up the content modeling and content delivery experience.

One of the strengths of a SaaS application is that Sitecore is going to continue adding functionality without needing to upgrade every time to do it. The foot is already in the door, so the team needs to push on it!

In the previous post, I crafted two content types and created records for home pages and each specific whisky item from my collection, populating them with actual data. Now let’s create a client “head” app to consume and display that content from Content Hub ONE tenant.

Content

• Part 1: Mastering Content
• Part 2: Developing Client App
• Part 3: Feedback and Afterthoughts

There is the documentation for the developers, a good start at least.

CLI

Content Hub One comes with helpful CLI and useful documentation. It has support for docker installation, but when speaking about local installation I personally enjoy support for installing using my favorite chocolatey package management tool:

choco install Sitecore.ContentHubOne.Cli --source https://nuget.sitecore.com/resources/v2

With CLI you execute commands against the tenants with only one active at the moment. Adding a tenant is easy, but in order to do you must provide the following four parameters:

• organization-id
• tenant-id
• client-id
• client-secret

Using CLI you can do serialization the same as with XP/XM platforms and see the difference and that is a pretty important feature here. I pulled all my content into a folder using ch-one-cli serialization pull content-item -c pdp command where pdp is my type for whisky items:

The serialized item looks as below:

id: kghzWaTk20i2ZZO3USdEaQ
name: Glenkinchie
fields:
  vendor:
    value: 'Glenkinchie '
    type: ShortText
  brand:
    value: 
    type: ShortText
  years:
    value: 12
    type: Integer
  description:
    value: >
      The flagship expression from the Glenkinchie distillery, one of the stalwarts of the Lowlands. A fantastic introduction to the region, Glenkinchie 12 Year Old shows off the characteristic lightness and grassy elements that Lowland whiskies are known for, with nods to cooked fruit and Sauternes wine along the way. A brilliant single malt to enjoy as an aperitif on a warm evening.
    type: LongText
  picture:
    value:
    - >-
      {
        "type": "Link",
        "relatedType": "Media",
        "id": "lMMd0sL2mE6MkWxFPWiJqg",
        "uri": "http://content-api-weu.sitecorecloud.io/api/content/v1/media/lMMd0sL2mE6MkWxFPWiJqg"
      }
    type: Media
  video:
    value:
    - >-
      {
        "type": "Link",
        "relatedType": "Media",
        "id": "Vo5NteSyGUml53YH67qMTA",
        "uri": "http://content-api-weu.sitecorecloud.io/api/content/v1/media/Vo5NteSyGUml53YH67qMTA"
      }
    type: Media

After modifying it locally and saving the changes, it is possible to validate and promote these changes back to Content Hub One CMS. With that in mind, you can automate all the things for your CI/CD pipelines using PowerShell, for example. I would also recommend watching this walkthrough video to familiarize yourself with Content Hub ONE CLI in action.

SDK

There is a client SDK available with the support of two languages: JavaScript and C#. For the sake of simplicity and speed, I decided to use C# SDK for my ASP.NET head application. At a first glance, SDK looked decent and promising:

And quite easy to deal with:

var content = await _client.ContentItems.GetAsync();
 
var collection = content.Data
    .FirstOrDefault(i => i.System.ContentType.Id == "collection");
 
var whiskies = content.Data
    .Where(i => i.System.ContentType.Id == "pdp")
    .ToList();

The advantage of GraphQL is that you can query against the endpoints specifying quite complex structures of what you want to get back as a single response and receive only that without any unwanted overhead. I ended up having two queries:

For the whole collection:

{
  collection(id: ""zTa0ARbEZ06uIGNABSCIvw"") {
    intro
    rich
    archive {
        results {
        fileUrl
        name
        }
    }
    items{
    results{
        ... on Pdp {
        id
        vendor
        brand
        years
        description
        picture {
            results {
            fileUrl
            name
            }
            }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

And for specific whisky record items requested from a whisky PDP page:

{
  pdp(id: $id) {
    id
    vendor
    brand
    years
    description
    picture {
        results {
        fileUrl
        name
          }
        }
    video {
        results {
        fileUrl
        name
            }
        }
    }
}

The last query results get easily retrieved in the code as:

var response = await Client.SendQueryAsync<Data>(request);
var whiskyItem = response.Data.pdp;

Rich Text Challenges

When dealing with rich text fields, you have to come up with building your own logic (my inline oversimplified example, lines 9-50) for rendering HTML output from a JSON structure you got for that field. The good news is that .NET gets it nicely deserialized so that you can at least iterate through this markup:

Sitecore provided an extremely helpful GraphQL IDE tool for us to test and craft queries, so below is how the same Rich text filed value looks in a JSON format:

You may end up wrapping all clumsy business logic for rendering rich text fields into a single HTML helper producing HTML output for the entire rich text field, which may accept several customization parameters. I did not do that as it is labor-heavy, but for the sake of example, produced such a helper for long text field type:

public static class TextHelper
{
    public static IHtmlContent ToParagraphs(this IHtmlHelper htmlHelper, string text)
    {
        var modifiedText = text.Replace("\n", "<br>");
        var p = new TagBuilder("p");
        p.InnerHtml.AppendHtml(modifiedText);
        return p;
    }
}

which can be called from the view: @Html.ToParagraphs(Model.Description).

Supporting ZIP downloads

On the home page, there is a download link sitting within rich text content. This link references a controller action that returns a zip archive with the correct mime types.

public async Task<IActionResult> Download()
{
    // that method id overkill, ideally
    var collection = await _graphQl.GetCollection();
 
    if (collection.Archive.Results.Any())
    {
        var url = collection.Archive.Results[0].FileUrl;
        var name = collection.Archive.Results[0].Name;
        name = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(name);
 
        // gets actual bytes from ZIP binary stored as CH1 media
        var binaryData = await Download(url);
        if (binaryData != null)
        {
            // Set the correct MIME type for a zip file
            Response.Headers.Add("Content-Disposition", $"attachment; filename={name}");
            Response.ContentType = "application/zip";
 
            // Return the binary data as a FileContentResult
            return File(binaryData, "application/zip");
        }
    }
 
    return StatusCode(404);
}

Supporting video

For the sake of a demo, I simply embedded a video player to a page and referenced the URL of published media from CDN:

<video width="100%" style="margin-top: 20px;" controls>
    <source src="@Model.Video.Results[0].FileUrl" type="video/mp4">
    Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

Bringing it all together

I built and deployed the demo at https://whisky.martinmiles.net. You can also find the source code of the resulting .NET 7 head application project at this GitHub link.

Now, run it in a browser. All the content seen on a page is editable from Content Hub ONE, as modeled and submitted earlier. Here’s what it looks like:

That concludes the second part of this series. The final part will share some of my thoughts and feedback with the team.

Most of my readers know me as a dedicated Sitecore professional, however, close friends are aware of the variety of my hobbies. Some of them also know me as a Scotch whisky expert and collector. After living in the UK for almost 15 years, I got a pretty decent collection of these spirits and learned hundreds of facts from attending dozens of whisky distilleries in Scotland.

Once I got my hands on a new SaaS offering from Sitecore – Content Hub ONE, I decided to give it a try on a practical example and try its capabilities as I was doing a real application. What would I use for the demo purposes? Something I know much about  – that’s how exposing my whisky collection was chosen. Let’s go through all the way starting with content modeling, going through actual data and media authoring and publishing, and eventually creating a headless app for content delivery.

Content

• Part 1: Mastering Content
• Part 2: Developing Client App
• Part 3: Feedback and Afterthoughts

First look

Once I got access to Content Hub ONE, I felt curious about what I can do using it. After logging through the portal, I got the ascetic main interface:

It exactly mimics your expected activities here: Content Types is used for Content modeling, Media is for uploading media assets, and Content is for creating content from your types and referencing uploaded media.

Content Hub ONE comes with handy documentation that helps understand the operations.

Content Modeling

For my purpose, I need to set up two content types – a listing type featuring items from the collection and item types itself to be used on the corresponding pages (marketers also know them as PLP and PDP).

Let’s start with a whisky type that represents an actual item from my collection. You can only choose from these basic field types:

• Text type can be either short single-line value or multi-line long text up to 50,000 characters
• Rich text includes markup and can take even more – 200,000 characters. It does not accept raw HTML.
• Number, Boolean, and Date/Time are obvious and speak for themselves.
• Reference gives the ability to link other content records to this item, with the unfortunate limit of max 10 items per field
• Media is similar to the above with the difference that it allows referencing uploaded media items.

Unfortunately, some crucial fields are missing, such as those used for storing links, URLs, and email addresses.

I ended up with the following structure for a whisky item type that features as many various field types as possible:

Next, let’s create a collection type to include a collection of items as well as some descriptive content within rich text type:

Pay attention to the archive field. From the home page, I want to distribute a zip archive with all 50 images of my collection, so I included this media field. A few challenges of this implementation are described below.

Media

Content Hub ONE users can upload media so that it gets published to Experience Edge CDN. However, its usage is limited to only images of GIF, JPG, PNG, and WEBP formats.

That is not sufficient for my demo purposes. I needed to upload videos of creative ads for each of my whisky items, as is referenced at whisky type. I also wanted to upload a ZIP archive with all 50 images featuring my entire collection, referenced at collection type. This is not something extraordinary and is very common for content-powered websites.

So, the question is – can I upload archives and videos? Currently – no, you cannot. However, nothing stops you from renaming your asses to something like video.mp4.jpg or archive.zip.jpg so that it successfully passes upload validation and actually gets uploaded and later published to Edge. With a 70Mb limit per media item, it can host many items including reasonably converted videos, archives, or whatever you may want to put there.

Please be aware that since anything else than images isn’t officially supported, you may lose access to such content once. Use it at your own risk!

In the next post, I will show how your head application can consume such content, including “alternative” non-supported media types.

Enterprises are slowly realizing that they quickly need to adopt cloud-native technologies such as Containers and Kubernetes to accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives. These technologies are the driving forces behind legacy application modernization and net new cloud-native applications that are needed to meet the ever changing demands of customers. These technologies provide various benefits for both Developers and Operators including:

• Portability: Portability is the key benefit of containers. Write once, package the code in a container image, and run it anywhere.
• Faster releases: Developers can ship the code and release new features faster allowing for better resource utilization on the platform.
• Declarative-style manifest approach: Kubernetes provides operators a consistent declarative-style manifest approach to manage the apps and the related resources/objects.
• Ease of use: Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are also packaging their software as a cloud-native app to help operators easily run and debug their apps on Kubernetes platform.

According to Gartner, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today.

Kubernetes Adoption Journey in an Enterprise

In a typical Enterprise, Containers and Kubernetes adoption is initially slow. Normally, it starts with a small team developing an app (not mission critical) that they plan to containerize and deploy on a k8s cluster in a single environment (typically using Managed CaaS offering on Public clouds) for PoC purpose.

However, when the adoption accelerates, more teams start working on identifying the apps that they would like to containerize and deploy on Kubernetes clusters in various environments (on-premise, Public cloud, or even on bare metal servers). Suddenly, the whole landscape gets crowded.

According to the IDC, Enterprises will build and deploy ~ 500 million apps in Production over next 5 years using cloud-native tools and technologies such as Containers and Kubernetes.

Kubernetes Adoption Reality – Growing Fragmentation

Fragmentation is being seen today within Enterprises. For example, say one team decided to deploy their app(s) on Amazon EKS cluster, and another decided to leverage Google GKE cluster. Although it is good for application teams to have the flexibility to deploy the applications on their choice of Kubernetes clusters, it causes problems for operators.

Operational Challenges with Fragmentation

If your team has struggled to resolve the following questions, you are facing challenges with fragmentation:

• How can we gain visibility into all the clusters from a centralized console?
• How can we troubleshoot containerized workloads across disparate environments?
• How can we quickly enforce Network and Security policies across the board and comply with the Enterprise guidelines?
• How can we efficiently provision the Clusters and manage it’s lifecycle?

Unfortunately, operations tools that companies have today, do not solve these questions. Each vendor provides their own tools to provision clusters, manage it’s lifecycle, and troubleshoot workloads. To solve this problem, you either need to hire an army of resources with a specific skill-set or push your existing resources to learn all these tools to support the infrastructure and app, both of which are not realistic approaches.

However, now there is a better solution, and the solution is VMware Tanzu Mission Control.

What is Tanzu Mission Control?

VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across different teams and clouds. As an API-driven service, TMC enables you to declaratively manage all your clusters through its API, the CLI, or the web-based console. From the TMC console, you can see your clusters and namespaces, and organize them into logical groups for easier management of resources, apps, users, and security. Some of the cluster management capabilities of TMC include:

• Cluster Lifecycle Management: Using TMC, you can connect to your own cloud provider account to create new clusters, resize and upgrade them, and delete clusters that are no longer needed. 
• Cluster Observability and Diagnostics: See the health and resource usage for each of your clusters from a single console. View cluster details, namespaces, nodes, and workloads directly from the TMC console. 
• Cluster Inspections: Run preconfigured inspections against your clusters using Sonobuoy to ensure consistency over your fleet of clusters. 
• Data Protection: Back up and restore the data resources in your clusters using Velero to ensure the protection of the valuable data resources in your clusters. 
• Access Control: TMC starts with a secure by default service, and allows you to use federated identity management and apply granular role-based access control to fine tune your security requirements. 
• Policy Management: Rather than manually dealing with the many aspects of managing your Kubernetes resources and the apps that use them, you can create policies to consistently manage your clusters, namespaces, and workloads.

Key Takeaways

VMware Tanzu Mission Control allows you to manage all your Kubernetes clusters–across packaged Kubernetes distributions, managed Kubernetes Services, and DIY footrpints–from a single control point.

If you are an operator, you will have complete visibility into all the clusters, be able to enforce Enterprise policies related to Container registry, Network, Security and more. That allows exceptional control over diverse environment.

If you are developer, you will have the freedom to use modern constructs and self-service access to Kubernetes resources. You do not need to worry about Kubernetes infrastructure but focus on what you do best–writing quality code.

The following is the first in a series of blogs about how innovation is necessary for businesses – and how Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a managed offering from Microsoft and Red Hat, enables that innovation. In this first blog, we’re going to examine the current cloud market and why businesses need to innovate now.

The benefits of cloud are many – scalability, velocity, and agility, to name a few – and the number of businesses that have modernized with cloud back that up. Gartner estimates the cloud adoption rate reached 85% in 2019, showing that the majority of businesses have at least moved some workloads to the cloud.

Early cloud adopters are increasingly ahead of the curve as they automate significant portions of their application lifecycle to innovate at a rapid pace, deploy applications more often, and reach their market faster.

It’s not too late, however, for companies that have yet to harness the potential of cloud technology to adopt these processes and tools. In fact, Forrester predicts that 2020 is the year that businesses will really start to modernize their core business applications.

Why are companies modernizing core business applications?

Unfortunately for some, the reason businesses are now modernizing their core business applications is because it’s the next stage in many businesses’ modernization journey, according to Forrester. Those that are now modernizing their core business applications have largely already modernized their systems of engagement and insight. This means those that haven’t started to modernize are behind. Businesses have already modernized some applications and are now moving to those that are crucial to their business.

Businesses are modernizing these crucial applications because of the need to innovate. New capabilities in cloud, automation, AI, and machine learning are emerging seemingly every day, and you need to be nimble and able to evolve in order to remain relevant.

It’s not just the business that has new tools to play with, either – customers do too, and their expectations are rising by the day. Developments such as bots mean that customers can now communicate instantly with you, and they expect you to have the information on hand to remedy any issue or answer any question that they may have. They expect to be able to communicate with you whenever, wherever, and however they want, and they want that interaction to be seamless. Providing that level of service isn’t a simple task, though – you must evolve to make it possible.

That evolution entails creating ways to improve the customer experience and may involve providing new services. With cloud, your IT team can become a center of innovation that can potentially drive business, just as Netflix’s innovative cloud-based services did. Netflix isn’t alone though. Businesses like banks, for instance, can now service clients almost entirely remotely. Whatever the industry, those that don’t innovate risk losing market share, becoming irrelevant, or even obsolescence.

How are cloud providers responding?

The cloud market itself is also shifting, with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure seizing control of the hyperscale cloud market in North America. Software as a service and container platform vendors are now partnering with these vendors to offer businesses solutions that can be leveraged on the major public cloud platforms.

As IBM Executive Chairman Ginni Rometty noted in 2019, cloud has passed the first wave of adoption – it’s now moving further and further into a space where multiple options are leveraged. This presents new opportunities for businesses – especially in the vital arena of innovation.

At the cutting edge of these offerings is Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a solution that combines the power of Microsoft Azure and Red Hat OpenShift, including Azure’s wide-reaching capabilities in areas such as big data, analytics, internet of things, edge computing, and OpenShift’s ability to empower developers to innovate with containers.

Throughout this series, we’re going to examine exactly what that means for IT organizations and how these capabilities, combined with Azure Red Hat OpenShift being a managed service offering, promote the innovation that businesses of today need.

To read more about Azure Red Hat OpenShift, you can download our guide, Power Innovation with Azure Red Hat OpenShift, by following this link or by following the prompts below.

Forrester has released its anticipated yearly predictions for cloud computing, giving businesses something to consider as they enter 2020. Cloud has seen many shifts in recent years, going from a place to collaborate, to somewhere to store personal information and then software, and finally to what it is today – a collection of tools that improve business processes and enable a larger digital transformation. This is why Forrester’s predictions are eagerly awaiting each year – the cloud’s dynamic nature.

This year, Forrester’s five predictions center on the cloud battle causing shifts, with many vendors to make strategic moves. Newer technology will emerge and grow at the same time, according to the predictions, to meet new demands.

Cloud vendors find their place

Vendors will return to familiar focuses due to Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft Azure, and, at least in Asia, Alibaba controlling the hyperscale public cloud market. IBM is anticipated to focus on helping enterprises use OpenShift after its acquisition of Red Hat, while Oracle will return its focus to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) and autonomous database products.

SaaS vendors as a category will join Oracle and IBM in moving to the hyperscale leaders for infrastructure purposes, too. This move allows them to focus on application functionality instead of trying to compete in areas like security and scale.

HPC, service meshes, and cloud security become a focus

We have recently seen the rise of containers and Kubernetes, and in 2020, the use of high-performance computing (HPC), service meshes/serverless computing, and cloud security will become a focus, according to Forrester. Cloud providers are ready to make HPC a cost-effective option on the public cloud, opening it up to consumers. In fact, Forrester predicts HPC use in the public cloud to rise to 40%.

At the same time, service meshes are set to come to the fore to provide interservice networking, visibility, and security on enterprise container platforms, while serverless will open new programming models. Meanwhile, recent breaches mean that security is also to become a focus, with cloud management players to lead the charge.

Read the full report from Forrester

Download the full report from Forrester’s cloud analysts to read more about their predictions and what it will mean for the cloud market in 2020 and beyond.

Want to know more about cloud and application modernization in 2020?

We are currently surveying IT people to learn more about what they are in their application modernization journey. By taking the survey, you will get the full results report that details the following:

• Where businesses are in their app modernization journey
• The considerations for selecting a platform
• Whether businesses are leveraging containers
• The challenges of the app modernization journey
• The main goal businesses are seeking by modernizing

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The following is the tenth blog in a series about why businesses are moving to the cloud to modernize and improve business performance.

In this series, we have highlighted the major benefits the cloud brings, including in areas such as innovation, security, and disaster recovery, among others. In this blog, we’re going to summarize those benefits and highlight how the cloud benefits businesses.

The benefits of cloud await

As we’ve highlighted previously in this series, the cloud today is more than a location to store files. Instead, it is now a collection of tools that enable businesses to undergo a greater digital transformation.

The reasons behind the ever-increasing popularity of the cloud are clear. This evolution of cloud and the tools it has brought mean the velocity, agility, innovation, security, and financial benefits that make the cloud the right choice for businesses in the digital age.

The cloud sets you up to improve the experience of the two most important groups in your business: employees and customers. Employees are able to work smarter, faster, and on more crucial tasks. Customers benefit from a smoother, easier experience as they enjoy financial savings that are passed on to them.

The cloud isn’t just about making short-term or quick-hit improvements that deliver just-in-time results. Instead, the cloud is about ensuring that your business is positioned to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment by enabling insight and innovation.

Summing up the benefits of the cloud

We have gone through many of the reasons the cloud is beneficial for businesses in this series. The following is a brief summary of those reasons:

• Business efficiency, velocity, and ROI
• The ability to innovate
• Reduced overhead
• Superior, adaptable security
• Improved data management and disaster recovery
• Reassessments of human and material assets

Learn more

Do you want to learn more about the cloud’s benefits? Click here or fill in the form below to read the guide Transform Your Business with Cloud and learn what cloud can do for you.

During the spectacle of the Sitecore Symposium 2019 opening keynote, Sitecore CEO Mark Frost casually dropped a little nugget of news about the future of Sitecore: a software-as-a-service option is launching in 2020 and will evolve into a new offering. A collective (but silent) groan could be heard from the developers in the room. Was this it? Did the integrators, partners, and developers in the room just become a dying breed?
Let’s take a step back and briefly examine what SaaS might mean for the future of the Sitecore ecosystem.

Sitecore SaaS Is a Ways Off

Officially, Sitecore is launching their SaaS product in the summer of 2020. The announcement quickly came with an asterisk: the initial product will only cover simple market needs (my best guess: simple CMS needs and simple personalization scenarios). Even if Sitecore were to go full-SaaS today, there are still thousands of existing and upcoming deployments that need world-class implementation partners, developers, and MVPs to keep them running smoothly for years to come.

SaaS Helps Cover New Markets

Sitecore currently serves mid- to large-market segments quite well, but it has always struggled to scale its message, tooling, and marketing platform to smaller markets. Licensing and integration costs are usually the culprits for this gap. With consumption-based licensing becoming more normal for Sitecore customers, SaaS-based offerings are the next logical step in addressing smaller market opportunities. Ideally, SaaS is a gateway for smaller customers to get hooked on Sitecore’s platform and eventually scale up to larger installations and explore more complex needs.

Customization & Integration: Sitecore’s Strengths

Sitecore has the reputation of being a developer-centric platform. With an expansive API, pipeline-based process architecture, and a flexible configuration system, developers and businesses can bend Sitecore to their will. This deep customization and integration potential has traditionally been Sitecore’s market strength, and no immediate SaaS option will be able to replicate that flexibility. Developers will certainly never be able to build and deploy back-end code to Sitecore’s SaaS products, but configuration-based customization and front-end integrations will likely be the future of differentiation for that line of products.

The following is the fourth blog in a series about why businesses are moving to the cloud to modernize and improve business performance.

So far in this series, we have examined the state of cloud and how cloud enables innovation, including a case study. In this blog, we’ll look at the benefits of cloud that power the ability to innovate – speed and agility.

Velocity of businesses

Business does not move at uniform speed. It varies from industry to industry, business to business, department to department, and even day to day. But many legacy systems are tightly integrated, which makes it difficult to significantly change a single system without impacting many others. This has limited the ability of some businesses to keep up with the demands of customers.

Cloud-based applications provide the ability to accommodate rapid change in response to customer demand. At the same time, cloud-based infrastructure provides unlimited scalability to support the most aggressive velocity of change without the long-term cost of unused private data center capacity. Thanks to its speed, cloud allows businesses to test the waters on development at a lower cost while not incurring any long-term cost if the test fails.

Agility and performance

The cloud doesn’t just bring speed – it also enables your business to be more agile and responsive to change.

Organizational agility

A digital transformation is about developing corporate agility across more than just technology. Cloud allows you to be more agile in the marketplace. For agility to improve, people need the tools to adapt to ever-changing customer demands. The ability to anticipate and take action immediately is an inherent benefit of adopting cloud technology.

Organizational performance

Performance can be measured by a variety of metrics, from corporate stock value to customer ratings. Cloud’s ability to provide real-time KPI assessment is an important tool to quickly respond to internal and external opportunities for performance improvement. Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings in the cloud arena provide fully automated tools to track corporate performance in all of your customer segments. This gives you the chance to build a portfolio of high-performing apps for both front-facing and back-end processes.

The cloud as a whole is highly scalable, which makes it agile and capable of delivering high levels of performance. This is useful both in terms of day-to-day events and large-scale, unexpected events.

Learn more

Click here or fill in the form below to read the guide Transform Your Business with Cloud and learn what cloud can do for you.

The following is the third blog in a series about why healthcare organizations are moving to the cloud.

In this series so far, we have looked at how the cloud brings robust data security and the cost savings and efficiencies that the cloud delivers for healthcare organizations. In this blog, we’ll examine at one of healthcare’s greatest assets and how cloud gets the most out of it: data.

Cloud connects for healthcare organizations

Data is king in most organizations, but there is no industry where this is more true than in healthcare. Without the cloud, data is often stored in disparate, disconnected systems. This means that organizations are losing an opportunity to streamline their activities and deliver to their customers.

Cloud fixes this by allowing disparate systems to speak to each other and share information. This is critical in healthcare, where data is of paramount importance. On top of that, many tools that can be built on the cloud, such as data lakes, pull data together all in one place.

A classic example in healthcare is the adoption of cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) solutions such as CRM packages. With these, the customer or patient data can be pooled, kept secure, and shared between marketing and lead generation efforts, patient experience representatives and care providers, foundation or fundraising professionals, HR hiring teams, and others.

A common concern often encountered in healthcare is the accumulation of overlapping tools and software solutions – issues that also arise when varied systems and departments are not connected and not sharing and leveraging similar technology platforms.

Cloud solutions provide a sensible alternative. Not only can your IT manager monitor and properly administer particular software installations in a consistent way, but they can also readily provide the necessary 10,000-foot view to all the technology solutions in use by various teams, and provide options for unified tools that are more secure, more powerful, and more easily supported.

Learn more

Downloaded our guide from here and continue to check out our blogs to learn more about why healthcare organizations are moving to the cloud.

The following blog comes from an interview with Perficient’s Strategic Advisors Consulting Managing Principal, Michael Porter, and is part of a series on cloud trends with experts from within Perficient.

Cloud usage today has gone from a step pursued by bleeding edge innovators to a normal part of everyday business. Indeed, many companies now follow a “cloud first” policy. With its ability to power innovation, promote collaboration, and streamline processes, more and more enterprises are embracing the cloud’s opportunities. That wasn’t always the case, though.

In 2015, 47% of enterprises were moving to the cloud, according to IDG. As of November 2018, nearly 60% of enterprises were moving processes to the cloud, according to Forrester. The increase in just three years shows the rate of change in the embrace of cloud.

This growth has been stoked by a change in attitudes, the ways cloud is utilized, and the offerings of vendors.

A change in perspective

The questions that businesses have been asking about the cloud have changed. Previously, companies asked infrastructure questions about what should and shouldn’t be moved to the cloud, and what the best practices for development are. In most cases, they wanted to gain pure computing economies of scale by replicating their existing infrastructure wholesale.

Companies now see cloud as a base. They want to utilize as many of the available cloud services as possible and then build on top of it. By doing this, they’re able to make use of the tools that the cloud offers. Those tools have grown from simple storage and authentication to more advanced offerings like AI and predictive analytics.

Significantly, security teams finally accept cloud as a viable option. These teams were previously skeptical but now believe that cloud is largely more secure than on-premises data centers. They know that vendors have large teams dedicated to security – and that these vendors depend on security for their success. Vendors continue to both improve their already substantial security and to offer additional security services. Most of the large cloud vendors and many software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors now let you manage your own keys separate from their infrastructure.

New ways to embrace cloud

As well as moving to the cloud, more businesses are utilizing the cloud in new and more encompassing ways. Many businesses see platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions as the way forward because they meet both their current and future needs. Businesses utilizing PaaS models can essentially build their own future by focusing on development and deployment with speed and agility. These early adopters are looking to get ahead of the game, believing most businesses will be on PaaS models in the future.

The embrace of development and deployment has also seen an increase in DevOps on the cloud. Here, development and operations teams work together, simplifying processes and further speeding up deployment. In most cases, a cloud development project now goes hand in hand with at least some DevOps efforts.

Along with a change in processes has come developments to support them. Companies’ cloud initiatives now realize additional benefits in the almost out-of-the-box support for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). Cloud providers use of multiple data centers and easy failover makes it easy to almost natively support failover within a data center and to other data centers. For those who remember the days of having to duplicate entire server farms just to get DR, this represents a welcome, and in some cases unlooked for, benefit.

The push for integration most shows in the rise of cloud-based integration tools. These tools connected a wide range of cloud-based SaaS and PaaS platforms, allowing businesses to do more with their cloud setups. There’s a reason why Salesforce bought Mulesoft and why tools like Zapier seem to have popped out of nowhere. These tools are now supported by a large number of SaaS services looking for better integration options.

How vendors are reacting

Cloud vendors of all sizes are coming out with more and more offerings. These offerings have become more granular in some cases, while others encompass a wide range of services.

With the increased focus on security, some vendors are now offering key management solutions to add to security strength. These solutions prevent people from accessing a business’s data when they’re accessing data that lives in the same virtual space. Key management allows you use a cloud service but rest well knowing that data is encrypted and that you, not the cloud provider, hold the keys to decrypt it. No unwanted eyes can view your data through a vendor’s data breach.

Vendors aren’t just adding services to their own offerings. The strength of Microsoft Azure and Amazon has seen vendors offer microservices and API management for these platforms too. These offerings, which work specifically on these platforms, give businesses that already have Azure or Amazon infrastructures new options. Many companies want to monetize their data. Doing so requires that you have absolute controls of how and when third parties access that data. These types of services make it possible to provide data as a service options for your customers in a variety of channels. Some prefer access via a simple site. Many others want to access an API directly to gain access that data.

That these offerings now exist reflects the stage that cloud is at. It is now a mature service and one that businesses know they need to embrace because failure to do so impedes their ability to react quickly and efficiently to ever-changing market forces.

Gartner predicts that 80% of enterprises will eventually migrate entirely away from on-premises data centers. The data indicates that this change is here to stay, and business are now embracing these opportunities.