I received an email this week stating that Microsoft is discontinuing support for Windows Server 2008. The email came from a hardware vendor exhorting us resellers to go after this opportunity and win new server business. The vendor indicated that there are approximately 4 Million servers out there running Windows Server 2008. Yes, I see this as an opportunity to sell servers, but more importantly I see this as a opportunity to assist businesses with the transformation from legacy platforms to new cloud based platforms where most traditional services that ran on servers now run on cloud platforms as services without the need for a servers, operating systems and software licenses.
One might be inclined to simply go out and purchase new hardware and painstakingly move software applications to new hardware. Some may even take this as an opportunity to do what is known as "lift and shift". They will simply provision a new virtual machine (VM) on some cloud platform like AWS, Azure or Google, then shift their applications over to the new VM. They'll breathe a sigh of relief and say that "we're in the cloud now". Not so fast. All you have really accomplished is moving the workload from your server to another server. Yes, you'll gain some economies of scale and may even lower your total cost of ownership. But what happens when the next operating system version come out? What happens when the third party vendor releases a new software update for the middle-ware that orchestrates activities between your back-end processes and front-end community of customers?
I think its really time to get about the business of transforming your infrastructure. The transformation starts with documenting and diagramming your systems. You may already have this documentation handy. Next extrapolate the entities and processes that uniquely define your systems. There are some common things that can readily be modeled and executed differently. For example, People entities like Customers, Vendors and Supplies are really very similar in nature. They all have a common business name, located at some address and have personal contacts associated with them. There's no need to recreate the wheel here. These entities can be modeled and implemented on a cloud platform like Salesforce.com with relative ease. Further to the point, you can easily send email to and receive messages back from your customers or vendors inside the application. This kind of transformation of your People entities accomplished the following: 1) Allow you to focus on the customer and not on the system 2) Quickly share information within your organization 3) Introduce High Availability to your information anytime, anywhere and on any device. All without the need for a private network connection or special security certificates, etc. Just imagine transforming your other business entities or processes in similar fashion. Imagine the new capabilities this creates such as business agility and competitiveness.
While I won't turn down the opportunity to sell you a new server and move your applications over to the new server platform. I am more interested in partnering with you and discussing how to transform your business systems to a model that does not solely rely on servers.
