Simplified and Accelerated Cloud Native MarTech (IDC)

The most efficient, flexible, and future-proofed marketing systems are cloud native. This architecture provides significant economic and operational advantages over on-premise or conventional SaaS solutions. However, many early adopters of marketing solutions deployed on-premise and SaaS solutions because they were considered best of breed at the time, and cloud-native solutions and IT organizations hadn’t matured to the point of mission-critical readiness. Companies that adopted on-premise or SaaS solutions now find themselves lagging in their ability to quickly upgrade and enhance their systems and adapt to the new demands of a highly personalized, digital-first, omnichannel world. Today, your MarTech infrastructure is your brand, and if you compete against companies with systems that provide greater resiliency, adaptability, and efficiency, you are at an increasingly significant disadvantage. 

When cloud first emerged, it was a difficult proposition to “lift and shift” conventional applications environments. It could take years of planning, testing, and parallel operations to make the change. However, legacy applications that have been “lifted and shifted” lack the agility, performance, and ease of use marketers need, while hosted SaaS applications lack customizability and control. For example, when Netflix first moved to the cloud it took approximately eight years. Today, that time has been reduced to a matter of days and weeks due to the evolution of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the migration processes and tooling, and the skills needed to operate in the cloud. Taking this a step further, HCL Unica has accelerated this cycle with its cloud-native foundation that is all about fast and flexible deployments. With HCL’s Solution Factory (SoFy), new cloud-native deployments of HCL solutions, including Unica, can be provisioned in a matter of minutes and deployed on premises, or via public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. If the full set of skilled resources is lacking, HCL can manage the cloud migration of Unica through its HCL Now cloud-native managed service.

HCL SoFy Changes Everything

HCL SoFy is essentially an app store on steroids for HCLSoftware solutions. It provides a simplified user experience for exploring many HCL solutions, allowing customers to demo and trial products and industry-specific capabilities in a sandbox environment prior to purchase. Having a tool to simplify the discovery and testing of complex solution offerings from enterprise software vendors is an innovation IDC hopes other vendors will follow.

SoFy also automates nearly all of the provisioning needed to deploy cloud-native apps including the new versions of Unica (12.1.x and higher.) With HCL’s SoFy, administrators, engineers, and developers do not need to be experts in cloud hosting or containerization. For example, they do not need to write YAML (the data markup language in Kubernetes) in order to migrate and manage the new cloud-native instance of Unica. Containerization makes it far easier to go to cloud native than old “lift and shift” methods. SoFy benefits include:

• Faster time to value: Deploy in minutes, migrate existing Unica data and processes in days
• Lower cost of ownership: Automated deployment, automated updates and upgrades, significantly lower operating and maintenance costs (no longer need to run on-premises in private datacenters)
• Flexibility and portability: Deploy on any of the three major cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud) and move from cloud to cloud without rewriting applications or customizations.

HCL Now – Cloud Native as a Service

Traditional SaaS applications are multi-tenant instances which mean applications share servers and databases with other users. Cloud-native apps are a single tenant.  The software runs on separate compute and data resources so they can be scaled independently. There’s no need to pay to scale the whole infrastructure just to support outbound volume, contact database, or analytical processing; each can be optimized for cost and performance independently. SaaS applications are bundled as full stack solutions meaning that the software, infrastructure, and cloud platform are not separable. Most SaaS apps require choosing a cloud platform and sticking with it, because the apps are not deployed the same way on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. Cloud-native apps are fully containerized so they are cloud-agnostic and therefore do not lock in an organization to one cloud provider. In the SaaS environment, the vendor controls how services, service level agreements, upgrades, and planned outages are managed. In cloud native, all of that is in the customer’s control. HCL Now delivers the control and security of on premises with the scalability, flexibility, and cost savings of the cloud.

Modern marketing infrastructures must solve for continuity and resiliency across customer engagements within and increasingly across front-office functions, which demands flexible provisioning, scalability, and operating cost models. When evaluating marketing technology, marketers should look for modern, cloud-native technology that simplifies technical concepts and tasks. Consider solutions that:

• Are no-code-low-code, where APIs can be dragged and dropped to build integrations by business users
• Make DevOps simpler
• Deploy easily in any of the leading cloud environments 
• Have elastic scalability, so marketers don’t need to worry about downtime during peak traffic
• Enable trials to support discovery and experimentation

Message from the Sponsor

To see how HCL Unica has made it easy to deploy and test applications, learn more about the cloud-native Solution Factory to see the full catalog of HCLSoftware applications.

Discover how cloud native integrated marketing platform can be deployed with the choice and flexibility to scale on any cloud & any environment – public, private, or hybrid – in minutes.