When chatting with Michael Krigsman and Mini Pereis ahead of the “Looking to the future of cloud” panel that Michael and I are part of at SuiteCloud, the topic came up of how much of the “heavy lifting” of software migration can actually be automated. Krigsman, an enterprise veteran who has sat through more migrations than I’ve had hot dinners, was of the opinion that the data is only a small part of the total pain involved in the shift and, because of this, there will always be a need for manual processes when migrating enterprise software.
I’m a little more aspirational in that I believe that we will one day achieve a future in which software migrations truly happen at the flick of the switch. A great conversation I had with Dean Dzurilla, Chief Relationship Builder of vConstruct the other day reinforced my opinion. vConstruct was a company that came into existence when Dzurilla, a veteran of NetSuite from the early days, left to set up a services business. After a couple of years of great success, the wheels started to come off the business due to lack of process. Dzurilla took the opportunity to look both inwards and outwards and determined a new course, one which would see vConstruct move to be much more a product company offering a vendor-agnostic migration toolset.
Dzurilla is adamant that any software migration has several levels of complexity which need to be navigated;
- Data
- Technology
- Process
- People
vConstruct in its current iteration, is a company that has built automated tools and repeatable processes to make transitioning between different applications faster, and easier. Bootstrapped off the back of their services revenue, vConstruct has three distinct markets for it’s product;
- Vars and integrators who want to use the vConstruct tools to aid with the low value data and process migration aspects of their work
- Vendors who see automated migration as a significant aid to easing the onramp to their products
- End customers who use the tools to help move themselves to the cloud
Currently vConstruct is using its tool, MigrationPath, internally to migrate services customers to cloud offerings, once that initial beta test is over, MigrationPath will be launched into the market where I believe there is a ready audience for the approach vConstruct is taking.
If you believe, like me, that cloud applications are the way of the future and you have an appreciation for the complexity involved in a data migration project, then vConstruct, and its product offerings, should be on your watchlist.