Page 19 - FCW, September 15, 2017
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Across government, agencies can expect their legacy IT business systems to fall behind at an accelerating rate. Vendors are aiming many of their advances in busi- ness analytics, big data and artificial intelligence at their cloud platforms and not at on-premises systems.
That approach will hit enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems hard. Chatbots, for instance, now use texting and voice in human-like, conversational formats to interface with applications. They are gaining artificial intelligence capabilities and could fundamentally change how people interact with computers.
But the most advanced chatbot tech- nology is being designed for cloud-based environments, not traditional systems.
The big ERP vendors, the primary suppliers of business and human resource applications to federal agencies, are cautiously nudging their on-premises users to the cloud. SAP said it will maintain support for on-premises ERP systems through 2025. In a written statement, Oracle officials told FCW that the company will continue to support on-premises software packages such as PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite and Siebel customer relationship management under its lifetime support policies.
However, they added that “support dates are reviewed regularly and some- times extended, and many of our on- premises product lines have new ver- sions in development.”
Such vendor dates are moving tar- gets, and long-term guarantees will offer little comfort if cloud platforms outstrip legacy systems in performance and innovation.
“The capabilities of on-premise sim- ply cannot keep pace with cloud-based options,” said Yvette Cameron, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development at SAP SuccessFactors, a provider of human capital manage- ment services. On-premises customers are “going to feel left behind over time.”
Her view is broadly shared not only by technology vendors, but also by offi- cials in the White House. Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser, recently told an assembly of technology leaders that a majority of government systems “can be consolidated and migrated to the cloud,” according to a government report of the meeting.
Indeed, the General Services Administration is viewing expiration dates for vendor support as a way to help push agencies to cloud platforms and shared services.
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