Mastering the Cloud – WMS Technology, Key Players and Factors to Consider

What To Consider When Selecting a Cloud Provider

Introduction

In today’s digital landscape, cloud technology has become an integral part of businesses across various industries. The benefits of native cloud technology are far-reaching, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency that traditional on-premises solutions can’t match. In this blog post, we will delve deep into the world of cloud technology, exploring its importance, key players, and the factors to consider when choosing a cloud provider. So, let’s embark on this cloud journey together and uncover the immense potential it holds.

Why Cloud Technology Matters

Cloud technology revolutionizes the way businesses operate and manage their supply chain, providing them with the tools to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Key benefits of the technology include:

1. Scalability: Cloud platforms allow businesses to scale their resources up or down as needed, ensuring that their software solution gives them room to expand as their business grows.
2. Cost Efficiency: With cloud technology, businesses can avoid hefty upfront infrastructure costs and only pay for the resources they use, reducing overall expenses.
3. Accessibility: Cloud solutions enable employees to access data and applications from anywhere, ensuring maximum visibility into your company’s supply chain & operations.
4. Security: Leading cloud providers invest heavily in security measures, often exceeding what many organizations can afford to implement on their own.
5. Disaster Recovery: Cloud technology offers robust disaster recovery and backup solutions, ensuring business continuity in the face of unforeseen catastrophe.

The benefit of this is that Domino’s – notoriously insistent on their promise of “pizza in 30 minutes or less” – are able to maintain control of their last-mile delivery, without losing out on the more convenient customer experience of being available on popular delivery apps.

Key Players in Cloud Technology

When it comes to cloud technology, three major players dominate the market:

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS): As one of the pioneers of cloud computing, AWS boasts a vast array of services, global data centers, and a strong track record of reliability.
2. Microsoft Azure: Azure provides seamless integration with Microsoft’s suite of products and offers a wide range of services tailored to enterprise needs.
3. Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Known for its data analytics and machine learning capabilities, GCP is gaining popularity for businesses looking to harness the power of big data.

Choosing the Right Cloud Provider:

Choosing the right cloud provider is a crucial step in leveraging the full breadth of what cloud technology has to offer.

If you are an end-user of a particular software, you do not typically have a choice of cloud-provider. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t considerations to make when selecting your software solutions:

1.  Security & Compliance: Ensure that the cloud provider supporting your selected software has security standards that meet your company needs and industry standards.
2. Avoid Technical Debt: Selecting a software that is cloud-native rather than just cloud-enabled ensures that your solution will remain optimal for your organization for years to come. If you’re interested in learning more about cloud-native technology and it’s benefits, check out the first episode in this series here.

As a software developer, you are free to choose the cloud provider that fits your needs most. When selecting a provider to support your software, take these into consideration:

1. Technical capabilities: Assess the technical capabilities of each provider, including the availability of specific services and tools that match your needs. Moreover, don’t discount the importance of documentation availability as it can make-or-break your team’s ability to successfully integrate the cloud platform into your software.
2. Cost Considerations: Compare pricing structures and choose a provider that offers a cost-effective solution while meeting your performance requirements.
3. Support and Reliability: Evaluate the provider’s customer support and service-level agreements to guarantee minimal downtime.
4.  Security & Compliance: As mentioned before, evaluate whether cloud providers meet your security needs to ensure your data is safe & secure at their facilities.

Conclusion

Watch the full video below:

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*Elements of the video have been paraphrased for readability. 

Charles Fallon, LIDD Founder & President
JM. It’s the end of the week, isn’t it? Well also, let’s all acknowledge it’s your birthday. Happy birthday.

Jean-Martin Roux, LIDD Senior Partner and Head of Technology
Well, thank you very much everyone.

Charles
So you are here to do a sequel on our last conversation. To do a follow up because there was such an outpouring of curiosity and questions and things people wanted to know a little bit more about this whole cloud technology discussion. We’re not going to cover everything in this meeting.

Jean-Martin
No, I think we made the decision. We’re doing a series now.

Charles
Well, because it is really important. And because I love that it touches on a lot of things. And like I said, because I had to rush here.

Jean-Martin
So we received a lot of questions. We bundled them into topics and we’re going to tackle these topics as we make a new series with a few podcasts. So I think we picked…

Charles
No, no, it’s your show. I get to interview you. So that’s the fun of it. Alright, so the first thing we want to talk about, there were a lot of questions about cloud providers. Okay? Yes. And let me frame it this way. So we know that there are two giants…

Jean-Martin
Three giants.

Charles
Who’s the third?

Jean-Martin
Alright, well frame your question first because you’re the interviewer and then I’ll answer it.

Charles
So as the ignoramus, the guy on the street, I know that there are two giants. There’s Amazon AWS. Very interesting right now. With the antitrust court case right now, will AWS be forced to be spun off? And then there’s Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. You just said, well, there are three giants. To me, I’ve never heard of a third person being brought up.

Jean-Martin
Really?

Charles
If you said, guess who it is… can I guess?

Jean-Martin
Well, I was about to ask you to guess. You started with giant, so that should be your clue.

Charles
Oracle.

Jean-Martin
No, actually.

Charles
Who’s the third giant?

Jean-Martin
Well, the third giant is Google.

Charles
Oh, of course. How dumb of me.

Jean-Martin
No, that’s fine.

Charles
So you really have, wait a second. That’s interesting because in all the discussions when it comes to business applications put on the cloud and I mean business applications for our client base, I’ve never heard of anyone saying let’s do it in the Google Cloud. That could be just, I haven’t had enough conversations.

Jean-Martin
Right. I mean, I’ll name one really close to you that runs on GCP.

Charles
Oh really?

Jean-Martin
Yeah. Yeah. Onomatic is built within the Google Cloud platform.

Charles
Why did you choose the Google Cloud?

Jean-Martin
Well, this is the theme.

Charles
Yeah. This is the theme. Why am I choosing between Azure, AWS, and now, Google Cloud? What are the features that make someone decide?

Jean-Martin
Yeah, there’s a lot of intricacies.

Charles
Isn’t a cloud, a cloud, a cloud?

Jean-Martin
Ultimately they are similar in terms of what they offer. And you could break the categories of pros and cons into technical and commercial.

Charles
Alright, let’s attack that separately then.

Jean-Martin
Yeah. So the first step into that is as you think about considering cloud platforms, what does it mean to consider a cloud platform first? So it is decentralizing, as we said, either the hosting of a single piece of software or your complete infrastructure. So then you have the option to go to one of the big three, the first one being AWS, which is Amazon Web Services, Microsoft is Azure, and then Google is GCP for Google Cloud platform.

Charles
As you hear the acronyms more than you will remember the motherships or the name of the bigger company behind them.

Jean-Martin
So then as you go and consider yourself, why should I go for one or the other? It will highly be highly influenced on who you are as an organization. So we’re lucky enough to be close to two businesses, one being LIDD and the other being Onomatic, having two very distinct needs and realities. If we think of Onomatic as a software editor and a solution provider, it’s got needs that are quite different to what LIDD as a software user and as an organization that is providing a service has.

So these are the first set of criteria that you think of is like, wait a minute, who am I? What are my needs?

Charles
So if we think from, think about it from a software editor perspective, you’re going to look at technology that you can partner with to resell your product, right?

Jean-Martin
If you are buying SaaS software from any of the large suppliers out there, it’s highly likely that they’re coming with an infrastructure that is not theirs. You brought up the fact that you only knew about AWS and Azure. One of the reasons you pick AWS as a software editor is because they’ve been around the longest and they are the biggest as well. So in the wide range of criteria, in terms of worldwide deployment, availability, the type of technology for databases, all sorts of technical components, they just are the most advanced.

Charles
I mean, I got more servers in more locations, number one reason or not number one. But that’s a big portion of it. And if you think, do you have an idea of how much in that very crude sense of more data centers, more servers, more locations across the planet, AWS versus Azure versus Google Cloud?

Jean-Martin:
No, not off the top of my head. I wouldn’t know. What I know is in terms of revenue…

Charles
Should I Google it? I bet Google’s going to say Google Cloud.

Jean-Martin
But I know in terms of revenue, in terms of size, the market shares, in terms of overall platform, you could give a half to AWS and then the other ones would share about a quarter.

Charles
You think Google is equal to Azure?

Jean-Martin
Yeah.

Charles
Okay, interesting. Cool.

Jean-Martin
But these are just facts.

There’s a lot of components that are part of a cloud offering and a lot of things are built on Google Cloud platforms. And I mean the amount of people that use Google applications on their phone. If you think about that, that’s ultimately, there’s a lot of Map apps that are just connected to Google Maps, but these are part of the reality of what you’re considering or the position you’re coming from to consider which one you’re going to be building on.

Charles
However, let’s take a client. So a client’s putting in a WMS, they want a cloud solution, then they go to you, they say JM, AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, right? Why? And which and why.

Jean-Martin
Which one is your WMS supplier coming with? First question, right? Because it’s highly unlikely that they will come to you with an option. They will say, we run on this. Otherwise it’s impossible for them to properly price the solution to you. It’s impossible for them to commit to all sorts of legal obligations that they can without coming to you with a partner that’s identified.

Charles
Okay, I get it. And now you’ve opened up a whole bunch of interesting questions, but my first question is then here’s a dumb question and then we’re going to revert back to Onomatic question. Okay. So the dumb question is, so me as a user of software, you are saying, Hey, I go in, I am going to host my application of this software in the cloud.

That software is natively built, right?

Jean-Martin
Yes.

Charles
And so I could have a WMS in Azure and a TMS in AWS?

Jean-Martin
Absolutely.

Charles
And really you don’t care as the user?

Jean-Martin
No. No, absolutely not. For our audience that’s seeking logistics applications, ultimately you don’t care technically, as long as all of these platforms can exchange information in a way that’s not going to create technical debt for you, you don’t care about it. The one thing you want to pay attention to is do they meet your business’s security requirements?

Charles
I don’t think we’re going to cover more than this one question in this podcast. I’ll tell you why. A lot of, again, back to Charles Fallon, I don’t know how to make the printer print.

Jean-Martin
I really don’t. No one does.

Charles
Everyone says, have you installed the drivers? It drives me nuts. How is it that every computer needs a driver to make a printer run? It makes no sense. Super expensive machine should be universal where you should recognize the file it’s coming from and be able to print it, but I can’t even get it to print. It keeps telling me the paper tray is empty. It’s not. I see it physically not empty. I want tell it. I see it. Look, your sensor’s wrong anyway.

So technical debt is a term you just used in describing it. Let me rephrase. You said, as long as it isn’t creating a technical debt, then you don’t care from the user, from the CIO’s perspective of what the hell does technical debt mean for all of us who need to sell these things ultimately is adopting a piece of technology that is already outdated or about to be replaced.

Jean-Martin
Like you’ve installed a technology on the cloud, but it’s really not web native, meaning it’s not built to leverage all the technologies of the cloud. It’s just a decentralized server. It’s not actually leveraging all of the other components we will likely dig deeper into.

So then all you did is move an infrastructure elsewhere and the piece of software that’s decentralized is actually sending what we call flat file. So still using let’s say an FTP protocol to exchange information with your WMS.

Charles
We have a very exciting podcast coming about integration very soon.

Jean-Martin
So I’m portraying an extreme scenario, but that I still encounter, there are pieces of technology that are just fake in the cloud.

Charles
And so technical debt is a generic term you apply to pieces of technology that you have in your application park in your suite of solutions that kind of holds you back, right?

Jean-Martin
It’s something like that, yeah. It’s like, you know how I’m into cars and whatnot. Well, I’m going to say it’s as if you’re buying a diesel car in 2023, you’re kind of on the verge of having to replace something you just bought, right? So that’s pretty much what technical debt applies to.

Charles
That makes sense. Okay. So back to this. So I get it, as long as I’m not getting any kind of technical debt issue going on, I don’t care. I’m CIO of Jerry Distributors. I don’t care technically about the technical components so long as it’s useable and not creating debt. No  the business things like the commercial, business and legal components of selecting a provider.

Jean-Martin
Yeah. So the commercial implications are quite interesting.

Charles
Well, I’ll judge that for you.

Jean-Martin
They’re interesting. Well, most of what I say is interesting regardless.

The point there is, and I’ve encountered quite a bit of it, you are dealing with gigantic organizations that may actually have interests and the big three we’ve mentioned that aren’t aligned with that specific distributors business.

Well, you think of Amazon, right? And you think of an e-commerce business that’s trying to compete. Well, maybe that e-commerce business doesn’t want to send a ton of money to Amazon. It very much annoys them that Amazon’s profiting off their e-commerce business indirectly. That’s first. Then the other piece is you have an extremely high volume of critical business information that is ultimately transacting through a third party’s infrastructure. So I mean, the contracts are critical. I mean, there are all sorts of, let’s say, nominal legal protections, correct? That you need to put in place. But still, if you are that retailer, do you really want your data running through Amazon circuits?

Charles
Not that we’re saying Amazon would do anything bad

Jean-Martin
No, no. But it’s funny, it is funny how SAP sells their software on a AWSs, and I could look it up, but they’re likely, if not the largest, but one of the biggest ERP softwares.

Charles
Oh, I think they, yeah, I think it’s amongst the largest ERP software. And AWS users, you’re saying?

Jean-Martin
Yeah, they resell. So the point is, if you’re pitching to Walmart, good luck if your platform’s running in on AWS. Right?

Charles
That’s really interesting. It’d be interesting if we could check right now if anyone knows, is Walmart using the Oracle ERP or are they on SAP? It’s interesting, where if you’re Walmart, yeah, you might be very nervous about that.

Jean-Martin
Absolutely. A hundred percent. So these are all things, the goal here is not to strike fear in our audience and the people that are making these decisions, but it is also something that you may not be instinctively paying attention to. But these are all considerations that also drive how even software editors are positioning themselves.

Charles
To me Google is I could see now you made the great argument of why there’s so much cloud infrastructure that Google provides, but I still think of it as more of a YouTube fun and not business things.

Jean-Martin
So yeah, I don’t think that’s incorrect in terms of general perception and also of let’s say early adaptability.

Charles
Let’s just call a spade a spade here. Having worked with a ton of companies, all startup companies adopt Google Sheets and Google work documents, and it’s always sort of like, don’t get mad at me. I’m sure there are many brilliant Google users who’ve built the most incredible Google sheets in the world, but for the average user, it’s generally what we call not quite or subpar even.

Jean-Martin
I’d go as far as, well, that productivity is subpar.

Charles
Sure. But I mean, let’s call a spade, which is like you said, I mean ultimately why an enterprise would consider Azure or the Microsoft product, it offers a lot of integration and a lot of security and it leverages all of their productivity platforms and all of their other business solution that they put out there. Like Microsoft is one of the rare amongst these three to also offer enterprise software themselves that they can actually come to the market and say, wow, we leverage our own infrastructure. I mean, they’ve got tons of solutions. We work internally with the Dynamics products and no idea where files are anywhere. But I know that it’s great, people love it. But you see that’s where also the Microsoft components are strong and put a lot of things forward.

Jean-Martin
But on neutrality, I think for our, what’s interesting is for our audience and our market, you’re a hundred percent correct, but Microsoft is also a huge US defense provider, which when you’re telling that story to doesn’t the facto resonate well everywhere, but for the markets that are interesting to us, since we don’t have much of a market in Russia, I think we we’re pretty safe from that.

Charles
But now let me ask you, okay, so now, just because see the clock is ticking. I know what go back to, so now I’m on automatic, I’m a really innovative revolutionary, some might say software product, and I’ve taken what Charles Fallon takes is a very weird choice I going on the Google Cloud platform. So from that perspective, why, tell us why that decision was made.

Jean-Martin
Alright, so the story starts by us trying to build the platform on Azure because of LIDD’s relationship with Microsoft, because of our already established knowledge of the tool, our initial work was done on it and it started off well in our ability to leverage it.

For instance, the authentication, if you log into Onomatic, we’re using a single sign-on tool, which is the Microsoft Active Directory Components. And you’ll hear SSO a lot for single sign-on. So that’s one.

But the point is, we got to a development cycle that quickly ran into roadblocks in terms of documentation, availability, in terms of, let’s just say more cutting edge distribution of resources of leveraging a database components.

Charles
Alright, slow down. Let’s just do this one by one. Yeah. What do you mean documentation availability?

Jean-Martin
I just mean if you are a developer, right? And I’m not the developer, this is something I’m just, my development team reports to me and I want that to justify why I’m making that decision. A lot of that I’m purely talking about if you give a task to a developer and you say, go build, that the resources available to the developer are more rich in GCP.

Charles
And what does that mean? What are the…

Jean-Martin
It’s just more documentation. There’s just more, you want to build a cluster, you want to deploy the Kubernetes container. These are all things that developers do. And just like us developers are going to, they’re going to Google, right? They’re going to go look for things. How the hell do I do this?

Charles
I see, I see. Okay, now I understand. And what’s so interesting about that, I think it goes back to my contention that if you look at it, the whole Google Cloud was primarily, or in the first instance developed for entertainment purposes, people’s pleasure and tools like that. And the reason I’m saying that is because think about video games and how video game technology, we don’t give it enough credit for its own, how it has pushed technology broadly because our desire for entertainment is so strong for fun, our fun seeking nature actually pushes technology. I mean, if you think about 40, 50, a hundred thousand, I dunno if you’ve watched the History Channel, maybe we’ve had meant multiple advanced civilizations over 6 billion years or whatever, silliness. But if you think about right now in this digital day and age, how our pursuit of pleasure can be such a massive driver of technological advancement, it’s kind of mind boggling.

Jean-Martin
Yeah. We chose the Google Cloud platform because the resources for available to solve so many data management problems and other things and development problems, and to bring the technology forward the way we wanted, we hit limitations within Azure. And it’s not, don’t get me wrong, we would have likely been able to overcome them, of course…

Charles
…but speed to market, that trumps everything.

Jean-Martin
And then it’s likely that we could have done the same thing in AWS, but since we had the chance to start from scratch,  the then commercial component comes into play. And then the commercial component, as a software development firm, there’s two things to it is how many markets are going to be open to you and how much is it going to cost?  AWS is in a position where it’s such a leader in the market right now that it doesn’t have to discounted services or offer any kind of special price, incentivize you to take them. That’s it. And then for us, we made the financial decision. Un terms of not having roadblocks, Google being the most neutral of them all, it was just a natural fit because it enables us to position the Onomatic solution at a price point that is quite competitive.

Charles
It’s attractive, but I think for all our friends in Walmart world out there, we want you to know you can buy Onomatic, you can deploy Onomatic, and it will never run on an AWS server. And I think that’s the perfect way to end the show. Okay. Other people have great questions, but I think we’ve got a whole slew of topics to, and then we’ll dig what are these technical components is something that we can actually dig into it.

Thank you so much. I learned a lot.

Jean-Martin
Yeah, worries. I’m happy to share.

Charles
Adios Amigos. Take care.

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