Significant points of the webinar:

Enterprise Integration Context (EIC) Defined

webMethods to the Cloud Trajectories

5 EIC’s Revealed

Transcript

David Smith:

Thank you for joining the Big Compass webMethods to the Cloud Webinar. We want to thank you for being here today. I'm the marketing director, David Smith at Big Compass and I'd like to go over a few housekeeping items before we get started. We're going to be using the question and answer feature of Zoom today. If you have questions during the presentation please pop them into the questions. I'll be stopping the panelists throughout the presentation to ensure that we get the questions answered on a timely basis when the subject that we're covering at that time, I think chat has been turned off for the participants in the webinar but if something comes up, just put it into the Q & A and we'll be sure and address it there. At this time I want to introduce our panelists. We're joined today by two people from Big Compass that have in depth experience. It's Tim Merkel, the founder and Shane Fisher, a Practice Manager in Seattle. I'll let you guys kick it off. Tim, take it away.

Tim Merkel:

Thank you, David. Okay, so just a real quick intro on myself and how Big Compass got started. I personally started working with webMethods back in 2001. Through a series of engagements and career choices, I ended up actually working for webMethods Professional Services itself, and then it became Software AG enjoyed that. Actually that's where Shane and I met and ultimately that turned into myself, my business partner starting Big Compass. We are laser focused on integration and specifically integration as a competitive advantage.

Tim Merkel:

What is integration as a competitive advantage?

It's a focus on the things that either silently accelerate, or silently kill a company's ability to compete in the market and compete against the competitors. We feel as companies scale and grow they add capabilities and complexity. If they get integration right they can accelerate things like innovation, cost and agility and that's our passion. We do this with webMethods but we do this with all technology. We love all technology, specifically the technology that wins for our customers. That's what we're all about here at Big Compass.

Tim Merkel:

Some of the problems that we're solving these days are Cloud and serverless integration, API enablement, big data movement, event driven architecture, single source of truth. These are the things that we're into. If you have any questions about those, definitely reach out and let us know. A real quick comment on why we do what we do. We do what we do because we like to build connections in the disconnected world. We feel a more connected world is a better world where people lean on each other, businesses lean on each other, nations, processes, companies. The more we work together, the more things are integrated we feel better the world is. That's what gets us up in the morning and gets us going.

Tim Merkel:

Why are we here? Today we'll be talking about moving webMethods to the Cloud. I was at the grocery store the other day, and I couldn't help but notice this magazine that says, "Do this one thing to make your webMethods Cloud migration successful." All right, that's me trying to be funny. The truth is this magazine doesn't exist but if it did exist, I bet you everybody on this call would pick it up and flip through the article. The cool thing about it is unlike the Cosmopolitans or the Seventeen magazines, we actually do believe that there's one thing that is critical you get right to enable you to succeed with your webMethods Cloud migration.

Enterprise Integration Context

Tim Merkel:

Let's dive into what that is. For us, the critical thing to get right is knowing your enterprise integration context.

What is your enterprise integration context?

Well, it's a combination of the research we're be doing here at Big Compass and pulling together of all the experiences we've had into essentially a personality test. We've all done these before, yeah at least I have I'll speak for myself. I'm an Ariel if you're wondering on the princess quiz, but essentially what this is, it's a personality test for your organization as it relates to your enterprise integration capabilities this context helps you understand the pathways to the Cloud that will work or may not work for you.

Tim Merkel:

Let's dive into this a little bit more. It's a little bit more than a Facebook personality test is actually pretty in depth. Let me tell you a couple of key points about the enterprise integration context. The first thing to note about this is that it's about your organization, not you. There are many of you on this call that think of yourself as an innovative person or somebody who would spend money on building the best integration platform in the globe. But that may not be how your organization views its integration capability and or your team. We strongly recommend that folks don't try to self-assess, there's some value in doing that but we recommend that people don't try to self-assess too much because you're too close and your own bias will be entered into the mix. But besides that, what is the need of the enterprise integration context?

Tim Merkel:

There's six competing forces that all enterprise innovation teams face and there's no winning. There's no right answer on any of these and they include costs, complexity, time pressure, compliance, your team's capabilities both current and aspirational. Maybe you're pivoting to be a cloud organization and making big investments but you're not there yet. There's a lot of nuances here and we have about just under 100 questions that we can ask you or multiple of your team to distill down into five well-known profiles. These well-known profiles exhibit behaviors that enable different what we call trajectories to the Cloud for you. We will show you these profiles in just a minute. But the great thing about knowing these profiles is that it's based on the opportunities and pitfalls that we've seen from folks with your same personality in the marketplace.

Tim Merkel:

One, you might gain some insight. Two, sometimes when you're justifying things to your team or your superiors, having an outside perspective on your situation really helps your case in your cause. Not only that, but once you know your EIC and once we pick a trajectory to the Cloud, you can throw together a quick business justification, do some high level budgeting and do some project planning and of course revenue, of course webMethods will help you do that, but these are things that the EIC will help you with. Without further ado, let's pull up the EICs. Now those of you listening to this are probably quickly reading down the list here and trying to figure out who you are, and that's great.

Tim Merkel:

Don't stop doing that. But again, just a word of caution on doing too much self assessment, Shane later on in the webinar will deep dive into each one of these and will talk about how they relate to each other but I wanted to throw these up there really quick, but in a nutshell there's some dimensionality around affinity towards your incumbent system that you have on-premises. There's some dimensionality around valuing innovation, around innovating savings and around valuing efficiency. We'll dive into those a little bit more later on in the presentation.

Tim Merkel:

Let's move now to how do we get to the Cloud? Once you know who you are and where you're starting from, how do we move to the Cloud and what are the cool ways to move to Cloud? For you technology folks on the call this is going to be a little more exciting for you. Cloud trajectories, one it's hard to say, and two it's cool because this weekend, the SpaceX rocket took off, and I'm sure they use the word trajectory and I thought I thoroughly enjoyed that. But anyway, the different trajectories to the Cloud there's five of them. And every company we feel picks one as their primary approach, but we have to recognize that augmentation is expected in no matter what strategy or trajectory you pick.

Tim Merkel:

Because of that, just given the number of cases and the number of technologies they're out there and the number of scenarios, gone are the days of the one-stop-shop strategy for integration. We'd like to pick one trajectory augment and because of that, we feel hybrid is the new normal. Again, we'll talk about that and substantiate that a little bit more. But without further ado, let's look at the five ways that we feel on-premises webMethods can move to the Cloud. I will go through these again really quickly, and then we'll dive into them deeper.

Tim Merkel:

The first one, I hope you're smiling a little bit because going to the Cloud with wait and revisit doesn't make sense at all. The truth is, for some folks waiting and revisiting is actually the right move. We're not afraid to recommend that when the situation isn't right and there are some profiles that actually map to that. Lift and shift, we all know about that. Moving your on-premises implementation to the Cloud means moving on-premises implementation to server in the Cloud. It's just lifting and shifting. iPaaS we've all heard this term hopefully. There are a number of offerings in the marketplace. WebMethods has their own, or Software AG has their own iPaaS called webMethods.IO but there's also just to name a few there's Boomi, there's MuleSoft, there's Workato, there's Informatica, Jitterbit, even all the way down to Zapier.

Tim Merkel:

Again Big Compass is fans of all technology, especially the ones that deliver for our customers so those are all the options that are there. Now, one quick note on technology and this webinar. While we are able to make some blanket introductions to the EICs and some blanket introductions to the trajectories to the Cloud, when it comes down to picking technologies, that is a highly specific recommendation for you and your organization. We can't today talk about our favorites or which ones we recommend for you, or we're not going to do a bake off today. Those are the things that we would love to engage with you on, when I say engage I mean just pick up the phone and call, we would have to engage with you on but we're not going to be doing any of that today.Possibly as a follow-on webinar we would do that and we'd love to hear your feedback on where to go, but just know that we won't be making specific technology recommendations today.

Tim Merkel:

The fourth option here, containerize is a very interesting one. If your team is taking on a move to the Cloud, you want more control, you're okay with a little more complexity, containerization isn't that interesting option. You can take integration servers and your universal messaging nodes, put them into containers and deploy them out to Amazon ECS, Fargate or the Azure container system and take advantage of auto-scaling, deployment methodologies, microservices, webMethods has that microservices runtime stripped down integration server which can fit inside a container really well. Lots of options and lots of capabilities that you can pick up there. But again, you pick up a little more complexity as well.

Tim Merkel:

Further down the stack is custom Cloud which is really turning up the complexity and capability knobs all the way up. There's a tremendous number of services and capabilities in all of the Cloud players. If you are really going all out, you could decompose your existing integration capabilities and we write them in custom cloud native solutions. There are a lot of pros and a lot of cons there as well. Some of those make a lot of sense. Some of those you might have questions on, don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything you want to drill into any of those.

Tim Merkel:

What we want to answer today, is once you know yourself and once we know the different ways that we get to the Cloud, how do we chart who should do what? Who has the most likelihood of success? We'll show you that later on in the presentation but that's what we are going to take the rest of the presentation to talk about. Now before we jump into that, and before I introduce Shane, I want to offer up the different ways that Big Compass can help you. One is, picking an EIC right now. You saw the profiles on the slide. If you see one that resonates with you, you could always just pick that and run with it. We have some additional information that we can provide you about that EIC.

Tim Merkel:

However, what we recommend is using our 30 minute survey. Again, 90 questions and it's a numerical answer that slots you into a well-known profile. That gets you out of interjecting your own self assessment into the situation and also helps you assess how the organization views you with hard hitting questions about, do you use the Reverse Invoke Server in the DMZ? Is your integration server clustered? We get pretty specific and it's pretty good, all the way up to budgets and timelines. A third option in which we feel is the best, would be letting us interview several people in your organizations. We do it over Zoom, we do it over a two to three week period and we'll come back to you with a triangulated EIC score, some recommendations on an approach high level and then we can even start to hash out a rough order of magnitude budget with you.

Tim Merkel:

This is a good way for us to get to know each other and take some baby steps together and allow us to add value. We're offering this up for free, so don't hesitate to give us a call and get that scheduled. All right. I did that as quick as I could because I wanted to give you an overview. But now the inventor of the EIC he will be coming to the mic. Somebody who I've worked side by side with for a long time and has tremendous depth of experience in the integration and a tremendous breadth of experience in integration as well. One of my most favorite consultants and members of the Big Compass team is Shane Fisher. Shane is going to take us through a deep dive on the EICs, a deep dive on the trajectories and then bring it all together at the end. Without further ado, let's turn over to Shane.

Shane Fisher:

Thank you so much, and thank you so much for those kind words. I set the bar really high now I have to deliver. As Tim talked through, there's really two main components of this analysis. Like any journey mapping, first is to understand where you're at and that's what Tim went through in terms of the enterprise integration context and we're going to keep hammering that point. It's really understanding which profile are you, and not you personally but your organization, your team, your IT organization because that's important, context is everything. Tim has gone over some really good detail around understanding that part of the equation.

Cloud Trajectories

Shane Fisher:

Now what I'd like to go into is the other part of the equation which is the target.

Where are we going?

Now that we understand who we are and where we are in the world, where is that destination? Tim has already alluded to some of these and what I'd like to talk about is how these rack and stack against each other. The first thing you'll notice is that as we go down this list, you have increasing complexity and capability as you would expect choosing between any of these menu items as you go down this list your ROI is going to roughly equal the amount of effort that you put into a given approach.

Shane Fisher:

Wait and revisit, obviously that's going to be the lowest amount of effort, but also the lowest amount of ROI. And by the way, wait and revisit does mean to absolutely do nothing. Wait and revisit could mean, hey let's do some analysis of our current architecture. Let's just figure out really what we have under the covers. Many of our customers have hundreds of integrations that have been built up over several years or a decade and understanding that a little bit better, I think is a good use of time if you're in this wait and revisit category because that'll just only give you more information once you decide on one of these other trajectories.

Shane Fisher:

Continuing to move down that list. Lift and shift obviously a little bit more outlay in terms of effort, in terms of costs but probably one of the easiest things that you can do in terms of this matrix here because it's really about just taking maybe your on-premises infrastructure, putting it up on EC2 and really not having to re-architect, or re-engineer most of your solutions. If you've got a Cloud mandate, like we've got to get to the Cloud, and that is really the most important thing to check that box that we're in the Cloud, maybe run down some infrastructure costs, things like that. Lift and shift is probably your best approach there.

Shane Fisher:

When we get down to iPaaS, you'll see it's smacked down in the middle of this list of recommendations and that's not by accident. What I like to say is the iPaaS approach is the most widely applicable in terms of all these solutions. I liked this, I've got a personal bias in terms of my sense is that if I knew almost nothing about your organization, I could still recommend an iPaaS solution to you. You would still get value out of that. Just because these platforms usually have end to end connectivity built in, they consolidate all your integrations into one space. They've already thought about air handling and logging and dealing with operational complexity, security all those things that you would have to do on your own.I think iPaaS is a very widely applicable solution arc there.

Shane Fisher:

Tim talked about containerization and that's again furthering down the complexity scale. This is going to be even more complex but you can get some additional value out of this in terms of being able to roll out microservices that are really fine tuned for your specific integrations, but it does also require some amount of re-architecture.

Shane Fisher:

Then finally going into the custom Cloud capability. We're huge fans of custom Cloud here at Big Compass. We think that this is also a really widely applicable approach. It can be some of the most complex in terms of having to write custom code and pulling together a lot of different custom services from all these Cloud offerings, but it can also offer some of the best ROI in terms of cost reduction and capabilities and things like that.

Tim Merkel:

Shane, if you don't mind, one thing that occurs to me as we're looking at this is if we we're at a conference and I had five integration professional standing in a circle. And we all talked about how we were going to move our webMethods to the Cloud, each one of them could say each one of these answers and all of them would be right. There's no... I think that what happens sometimes is we get engaged in these conversations that are purposely accidentally, and we walk away thinking, "Oh, they're going to go custom Cloud? Is that the way everyone's going now?" And I think it's... Hopefully this is comforting the fact that these are all very valid and it's just a matter of choosing out which one is more valid and more correct for you personally.

Shane Fisher:

Agreed. Thank you for saying that. I think that'll come up later on when we glue all this together. But one of the things to understand about this is that there is no one absolutely 100% right solution. Any EIC can take any path to the Cloud it's just which ones do we find are better matches in terms of you're going to have fewer roadblocks in your way and increase your likelihood of success.

David Smith:

I'll add to that. Tim you brought up an interesting point about practitioners being there and having different approaches. I think you'd hear from all the vendors that their approach is right. That even adds another level of confusion and maybe some confidence issues of that, how do I know that I'm making the right decision because everybody telling me their approach is the correct one.

Tim Merkel:

Exactly.

Shane Fisher:

We alluded to our hybrid before and really what this means is that in practice businesses are rarely 100% in one camp. What that really, is an acknowledgement is that one size does not necessarily fit all. You may have a center of gravity around what type of approach that you take. But what we find is that you often have to augment in terms of, if there's missing capabilities of your chosen and platform or your chosen approach you often have to augment that solution with other approaches. Gartner refers to this as the hybrid integration platform and we'll take a look at a slide coming up around that. But some examples of hybrid approaches and really think about some of these and consider if your businesses it falls into one of these categories.

Shane Fisher:

One example, you may have more than one integration platform. Tim and I both had worked at all sizes of enterprises. Some of the really big ones have pretty much every integration platform there is. Others may just have one or two and this can also occur with mergers and acquisitions when two companies are coming together and they each have a center of gravity around a given platform that's a hybrid example. You may have a platform, but you're pulling in Cloud services from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud platform. That is a very common approach and one that I almost universally see in terms of modern iPaaS approaches. It's very rarely just that platform-

Tim Merkel:

Specifically around spiky workloads that might be a good to be 80% or 90% platform, and then 10% custom on those areas that justify that investment.

Shane Fisher:

Absolutely. Yup. Some examples, you could have a platform but maybe want to leverage API management services from Azure API management or you want to augment with external messaging, Cloud messaging, Amazon, SNS, SQS things like that. Those are just some examples of where you might do that. You may also be hybrid if you're conducting some integrations manually. I'm guessing if you pulled yourself, you're going to pull your organization you would find that there's still some swivel chair that's going on or manual spreadsheet, uploads, downloads, things like that. That is a form of hybrid and it's completely valid.

Shane Fisher:

I'm a firm believer in spending your innovation dollars where it makes sense and if it's cheaper to have an individual move data from one system to another absolutely do that. You don't have to automate every single thing. Then finally citizen integrators. You may find that you have business units that are actually conducting their own integrations using their own tool sets and that's completely fine too. Next slide. This is a Gartner's take on why hybrid exists and really what it comes down to is that you have four competing forces around your integration models. And those competing forces are your constituents, which, who is the integration for? Who is the integration actually serving? It could be a citizen integrator, again the aforementioned business stakeholder. It could be things IoT and it could be folks that are within your it organization that are specializing on integration.

Shane Fisher:

Who is the integration for? The end points, what is being an integrated? It could be you're integrating with a SAS offering, you could be integrating with a device mobile all those different use cases. Then patterns. There's a number of different integration patterns. Anybody who's done integration for any length of time at all you've seen this. There's requests reply, there's files plops, there's APIs, there's event driven architecture. There's a lot of different patterns that we see as well. Then deployment models. Where's this integration actually going to execute as a Cloud to Cloud, Cloud to ground, ground to Cloud, is it embedded? All of this is just to say that no one platform or no one approach is going to solve 100% of all these different challenges and this is why hybrid exists. Getting into the enterprise integration contexts. This is where we'll see a deep dive on what each of these profiles is and why they exist.

David Smith:

Hey Shane I'll give you a timestamp real quick. We're about halfway through.

Shane Fisher:

Got it, thank you. Big reveal. Enterprise integration contexts. As Tim alluded to before you may be already looking at this and saying, "Okay, where am I on this grid?" And that's great. Again the key here is to know ourselves so that we know where we're starting from so that we know what the best path forward is going to be. Nothing to call out here is that there almost infinite variations of different business drivers that there's six that we include in our integration context survey.

Shane Fisher:

Thank you. But what we ultimately found out in our analysis is that they can all generally be distilled into these five major buckets and that's what you see before you. We start to decompose this table a little bit. Starting along this top axis, you see on the far left side, you have profiles that are really budget sensitive or budget driven. This is the safe, safe, safe category. There could be multiple reasons for this. Your business could be downsizing or it could be looking to generally reduce costs particularly in the IT space, you may find yourself in this category. On the far right side, these are folks that are 100% innovation-driven, innovator's die is what we like to say here. Another thing to call out here by the way, is that if you're immediately looking at this and saying, "Well, we're innovative." Absolutely. These are these aren't exclusive to one another, it just means where is the emphasis in terms of your approach.

Tim Merkel:

On that innovation thing we put innovate or die up there not as a cute slogan. It's actually a one way to check am I an innovative? Is my organization an integration innovator and the way to answer that question is, is integration the jugular of my business. And if integration goes down, my business goes down or without the integration, my whole business model breaks down. Now we know that integration can support revenue streams, of course, but we've worked with, with customers whose product is an integration product and if they aren't the best at integration in their space, they will lose. That's just one way to check. Are you on the right side or are you in the left side? Unless it's like to save or die, if we don't cut costs, we're going to die as an organization. Then of course, Shane's about to talk in the middle, but I like to use those as sobering questions on that spectrum.

Shane Fisher:

Yep, absolutely. Well stated, thank you. As Tim alluded to there, now you see this wide path that's in the middle and these are efficiency driven. This is going to be a lot of the businesses out there that are just looking to squeeze more and more value out of their IT investments. Do more with less as is the mantra for this class of organizations. That's where you see the platform champions. Now we talked about that top axis. Now let's talk about the left axis here or I'd say the Y axis. Really what we're talking about here is, what is your affinity to what methods? Starting with a high affinity and going to low affinity. This is your high affinity webMethods if you're heavily, heavily invested in that webMethods platform and not looking to change that anytime soon.

Shane Fisher:

You may just be looking to augment your existing solution. But in general you've got a good solid team you've got good internal knowledge of the platform and want to maintain that investment in the platform and so that would be you if you fall into that category. Low webMethods affinity is the opposite of that. You may have had webMethods in the past or you do and are starting to move away. You're starting to see some of the other platforms and tools out in the marketplace and you may not have a huge webMethods team, or maybe your current integrations on the web methods platform are just in what do you call maintenance mode where folks are part time monitoring that, but they're also doing other things. So you're not as tightly coupled to that platform. That's that axis as well.

Shane Fisher:

The way this breaks out is then what you end up with is in a budget driven side of things, you have a webMethods saver. This is high affinity to webMethods, but looking to reduce costs. The Greenfield saver, which is low web methods affinity but we want to start with something new. There's other things out in the marketplace that we want to take a look at. Then on the extreme right, what methods innovator is driven to innovation. You have high affinity to what methods, however, you're looking to augment that platform. We need to do more and we need to continue innovating.

Shane Fisher:

Perfect. Perfect. Cool. Then I think the other thing I was going to talk about after this is the Greenfield Innovator. This is, sorry I'm using my pointer tool here, we're looking at this right here. Is that working?

Tim Merkel:

I'm not seeing your arrow.

Shane Fisher:

Okay. That's okay. Lower right. Greenfield Innovator. This is basically low webMethods affinity. You're moving away from the platform, but again, you're in that innovator die category. You need to get... Integration is central to your business you have to continue exploring other options in the marketplace. Then this wide path in the middle that we talked about before the platform champion this is an organization that understands the value of having a platform focused on integration.

Shane Fisher:

You may be a company that wants to spend its innovation dollars, doing the things that your business focuses on and that's not integration. You could be a retail company, it could be telecom, it could be healthcare any of those things. It's just integration is not central to your business, but you understand the value of having a platform that's purpose driven, that's purpose built for integration.

David Smith:

Okay, excellent.

Tim Merkel:

Ready to bring it all together Shane?

Shane Fisher:

Let's do it.

Tim Merkel:

All right and I reveal.

5 EIC’s Revealed

Shane Fisher:

All right. This is really, again, gluing together both your integration contexts on your left, that we talked about again, just to remind you what this is, your personality profile for your organization.

Who are you when you take that test?

It'll help you classify yourself in terms of where you fit here. On the right is the journey that you will most likely see success with. And again, I want to remind folks that these are not 100% absolutes. It's just these are the things that we've seen based on our experience in the industry and what our analysis is uncovered is likely going to be a successful path for you. You're free to choose whatever alternative paths that you see here as well just understand that you may encounter some challenges that you weren't expecting along that journey.

Shane Fisher:

But again, starting from the top, platform champion. Your most trajectory here is an iPaaS solution. Again you understand the value of having a platform that's focused on integration. Integration may not be the core of your business you'd rather focus those innovation dollars elsewhere. Moving on to the webMethods innovator. A containerization solution might be good for you. That's that high affinity to web methods, but we want to do a little bit more with it. And so the containerization solution is a good path there.

Shane Fisher:

Moving on down the line, what methods saver. Again, this is high affinity to webMethods but budget is a key concern. We have to do whatever we're doing with the platform and we have to do it cheaply. Lift and shift is going to have that lowest burden in terms of both costs and complexity. This may be a good path for you. Alternate paths here could be containerization or an iPaaS solution. Greenfield Innovator. This is going to be low webMethods affinity and as we said before, integration is core to your business. This is innovator die. What we offer is integration services to our customers and therefore a custom solution totally makes sense there.

Tim Merkel:

This is like, we've heard the term born in the Cloud. This is if you want to be reborn in the Cloud.

Shane Fisher:

Exactly, exactly. Then finally your Greenfield saver. This is again moving away from webMethods but you may be extremely budget pressured. So this is a category where a wait and revisit, or at least analyze your current situation and figure out which one of your business drivers really should win. You may fall into this category. The other thing that you'll notice is iPaaS is an alternative for all of these. Remember I said, iPaaS it's almost universally applicable and this is why because as an alternate approach the iPaaS has a lot of capabilities that almost any business of any stripe can leverage.

Tim Merkel:

Yeah. As a big center of gravity there.

Shane Fisher:

Okay.

Tim Merkel:

All right. This is where we're going to pause for a minute. It's a lot to drink in on one slide. If anybody has any questions, now's a great time to type them into the Q & A button, or if this slide triggers any questions of course, get in touch with us afterwards, but now's a great time to dig in. All right.

David Smith:

Shane contrast... We had an earlier slide with the value and cost just oppose to each other, comparing that when rising, when declining. Does that still fit here when we look at the EICs and the trajectories together? Does that still bring into the context return on your investment and the cost?

Shane Fisher:

Yes, absolutely. And that's why you'll see in the EIC names, there's a saver versus an innovator. Again with the webMethods, there's a webMethods innovator, webMethods saver. Cost is one of those six competing forces that we really have to balance against. Again revisiting wait and revisit is going to be the absolute lowest cost. Lift and shift very low cost in terms of the approach that you're going to take. And the rest of these are roughly equivalent or ascending in cost.

Shane Fisher:

Containerization solution it's going to be some re-architecture. You're going to spend some money doing some redesign there. A iPaaS solution you're going to spend a few dollars on licensing around that maybe a little bit of redesign. Then custom Cloud, same thing. You're going to spend some dollars on innovating and doing some custom developments paying for Cloud services and things like that.

Tim Merkel:

I always enjoy... Not enjoy but it's interesting to think about some of the journeys that our customers have taken. Who've taken maybe one click or two clicks off course decisions where they find themselves mired in tons of custom code, and then they go, "This is not our business, why are we knee-deep in code?" And then they say, "Surely, there's got to be a platform out here that can do this for us."

Tim Merkel:

Then by the same token, I've got some customers that have invested heavily in a platform and said, "Man, this is missing a few key, very nuanced, very specific capabilities that we need to compete in the marketplace and now we have a platform and we're custom writing code, and that's where we need to be." There's a move towards more of the complexity more capability. It just goes to show there really is no right choice in making the right, well there's a right, there's better choices and making the better choice up front can really avoid too much course correction in your journey.

Shane Fisher:

Absolutely. Well said.

Tim Merkel:

With that, unless there's any other questions, what I'd like to do is re-assert our offer to help you with this. Again we're offering this for free, we're really excited and proud of EIC. Between just Shane and I is roughly 20, 40 years of industry knowledge baked into this and we're excited to share it with you. Hopefully you got some value out of looking at our slides today, and if that's what you needed, great, if not take our survey you will get an email afterwards inviting you to take the survey or the assessment, actually it's self assessment. It really does take 30 maybe 45 if you really contemplate some of the questions. Then if that seems like too much work, give us a call. We'll hop on two or three Zoom sessions with you as a fourth readout and give you our perspective and let you run with that, no strings attached.

Tim Merkel:

Next step. Again, I mentioned we're going to email you the EIC, but if you guys are so excited and you want to do it right now, go check out eic.bigcompass.com and that'll jump you right into the survey. Actually, I should quit calling a survey. It's actually an assessment. I just wanted to leave you with a thought that Big Compass we're happy to help as little or as much as you'd like. We do strategy, we do assessments like we're doing right now. We're happy to just design and help you guys with budgeting and planning, or project charters, or justifications. We have hands-on doers and coders that can help you get where you need to be.

Tim Merkel:

If it's a benefit, we also engage in a lot of coaching and staffing. Maybe you have some team members that are going to be meeting with us weekly to get boned up on a piece of technology would help. We're happy to do that. Or if you just need to grow your team, we're happy to help you guys there as well. Again, my name is Tim Merkel, I'm the managing partner here, and you can reach out to me directly tim@bigcompass.com or give me a call right after this, or at any time ad hoc at (303) 591-4371. Don't hesitate to reach out. David, did we fail to cover anything in our webinars today?

David Smith:

No, I think we did great. I think you guys covered the EIC, the trajectories very well. I think a good layout of what that means to a webMethods customer contemplating migrating to the Cloud. I want to thank you for covering that. I want to thank our attendees and participants today. We very much appreciate you coming online with us today and learning a little bit about the EIC and definitely as Tim said, we'll be following up with you, so have a great rest of your day and we'll be ending the session.