If Software as a Service (SaaS) has ever been on your organization’s radar to explore, or do more of, now is the time, especially after experiencing a global pandemic. Like many reading this blog, no one could never have predicted what the year 2020 would have in store for us. I am about 99.99% confident that not one person listed “live through a global pandemic” on their life’s bucket list. And if you are that 0.01%, well your list is shorter.
With all the disruption that the pandemic has caused each one of us in our daily lives, both professionally and personally (thank you, Netflix), hopefully has brought awareness. Most of us had to pack up their office/cubical/desk sometime in March 2020 and hunker down at our make-shift home offices, kitchen counters, living room or wherever you found space in your home and continue to do our jobs to the best of our ability. During that transition and the months to come, you have adapted and overcame obstacles and (hopefully) saw opportunity to improve your organization in the present and future.
If you are a Maximo admin or IT professional managing Maximo with other applications, then this is for you. You should not have to trouble shoot availability performance, plan for upgrades, worry about disaster recovery, security enhancements etc. Your role should encompass consuming Maximo and all its features to better serve your team and organization. Let me rephrase that, Maximo should serve you, not you serve Maximo. Having Maximo in the cloud allows you to focus on the software, not everything else the software needs to run in the first place.
Just think if you had to patch, scale, and secure a server by yourself just to watch and use Netflix. I bet you would have never watched ‘Tiger King’ this past year or even used Netflix at all. You simply want to use Netflix; you don’t want to worry about the technical aspects of the system. Why can’t IBM Maximo be the same way? Hint: it can!
It is no secret that a SaaS solution is a more cost-effective way to deploy your software and Maximo is no exception. When your Maximo is in the cloud you no longer budget for software upgrades, which can be a significant cost that occurs every 2-3 years when you are on-premises. Another big-ticket item is licenses. Typically, you procure on-premises licenses at retail and pay an annual fee to maintain those licenses. Which means, you would need to plan for growth typically around a fiscal year and categorize them as Capital Expenses. Whereas a SaaS solution falls into the Operational Expense bucket and tends to be more flexible with growth.
Again, taking Netflix as an example, imagine if you had to pay an upfront fee of $1,000 just to obtain the technical components you need to simply run the software. Then in a few years Netflix requires a new $1,000 server that you need to buy to continue to use the service. No, you want to simply pay $10/month and let the experts handle all that. For Maximo, the same thing applies when ran as a SaaS solution. You know your costs years in advance, and you have peace of mind knowing the experts are making it work.
Depending on your organization there may be only one person responsible for managing Maximo or there could be a team of folks. Regardless of the setup, having the peace of mind that you have a team of trusted resources supporting your journey with Maximo is priceless. Maximo is a robust product, and each year will have new enhancements that you will need to be aware of and how to apply those changes to benefit your organization. It is impossible for that to be one person’s or a team’s job to always be in the know. Partnering with certified IBM Maximo Business Partners to help with Maximo functionality is imperative. In addition, finding a company that can do that and provide a Maximo SaaS solution that has been around for over 20 years, well that is the total package.
Take it a step further with Netflix. If you had to have all the technical ‘know-how’ to run a server to watch Netflix…Blockbuster might still be in business. You want Netflix to take care of the problems so you can sit back and catch-up on Bridgerton (ladies amirite?). For Maximo, there are a TON of technical aspects to the system, not to mention the effort it takes to secure that data. Let the network of industry leading Maximo experts assist you with your Maximo so you can finally use it for the reasons you purchased it in the first place.
The reasons listed above may have come to light in the past year while working at home (or while watching Netflix). Trying to manage Maximo without the ability to walk down a hall to consult with a co-worker or go in the field and work side-by-side to troubleshoot an issue is no easy task. Having Maximo as a SaaS solution, provides you the freedom to focus on the business processes that Maximo is supporting, rather than maintaining the thing that maintains your maintenance.
2020 brought a lot of unknowns (not to mention my favorite Netflix series being delayed), but I hope it brought you awareness that 2021 would be the year to take Maximo to the cloud (and maybe getting outside more to cross off some new and, hopefully, non-pandemic related bucket list goals 😉).
