Every week there’s a new cloud service or product, which the industry immediately classifies using a set of overly-simplistic labels — public, private, hybrid, and so on. The jargon takes center stage, while the actual value of the technology is obscured and left unclear to the business and IT leaders who need to understand it most.
But what if we looked past industry jargon, and instead identified cloud offerings by the value they provide your enterprise? Though it’s easy to oversimplify, modernization isn’t binary. It’s not accomplished with “cloud-native apps” running on AWS or Google Cloud. It’s about how each aspect of the cloud — including infrastructure, development processes, and application architecture — works across your business to benefit your company at every level. At Skytap, we determine where each of our customers are and help them modernize over time, at their own pace.
We’ve carved a space for ourselves in a crowded cloud market by addressing this need to meet customers where they are. We recognized that while the large-scale cloud providers are offering services for building and running new cloud-native applications, the majority of an enterprise’s mission-critical apps are still trapped in the data center. Skytap caters to that significant, and underserved, market by allowing enterprises to move those traditional, legacy applications out of the data center and into the cloud unchanged, then modernize them over time.
Skytap Cloud has proven to be a service that allows businesses to modernize in alignment with their unique environments and needs. Now we’re announcing continued business growth and product innovation all to the benefit of our customers:
- We’re adding top talent to our team: Neil Holloway, former president of Microsoft EMEA, has joined our executive team. Neil has 30 years of experience building enterprise technology partner ecosystems, and we’re excited for him to continue enriching Skytap Cloud’s capabilities through strategic relationships with other cloud leaders.
- We’re working side-by-side with the biggest cloud companies: In 2018, we’ll deliver integrations with third-party cloud services, including AWS and IBM Cloud, and continue to expand our partnership with IBM, including support for Linux on IBM Power.
- Our sales are surging: We’ve closed five of our top ten customers just this year, existing customer upgrades grew nearly 300% YoY in Q3, and Skytap Cloud usage surged by 188% YoY in Q3.
Today’s announcements demonstrate Skytap’s focus — delivering a cloud uniquely tailored to modernize the infrastructure, processes, and architecture powering traditional applications. We revealed our intent to support AIX in March, and now it’s here, making Skytap Cloud the most comprehensive cloud for modernizing infrastructure powering legacy applications. We’ll continue to invest in this area by delivering support for Linux on IBM Power in 2018 and are already seeing great customer adoption of AIX on Skytap Cloud, including leading interactive voice response provider Blueworx.
Building on our infrastructure capabilities, we’re looking toward new capabilities for modernizing development processes and application architecture. Our 2018 integration with third-party cloud services from AWS, IBM Cloud, and others will open a rich collection of application services, cognitive capabilities, and data analytics to Skytap customers, making it easy to rapidly accelerate development and evolve architecture in our cloud.
What you won’t see Skytap do is chase trends or jump into category debates. We’re the cloud for modernizing traditional enterprise applications. Period. The full benefits of modernization don’t happen overnight. But they are very much attainable, and build progressively through each stage of the process — beginning with migrating core applications unchanged to immediately leverage cloud scale and efficiency. The benefits continue to build over time through process and architecture improvements that accelerate innovation and make you more adaptable to change. Skytap is your partner throughout this evolution. Whether we integrate technology or build it ourselves, our commitment is to deliver services that solve your business challenges today, and prepare you for whatever tomorrow brings.
