| November 2, 2021

Accelerate Cloud-Native Transformation with HCL SoFy – Analyst Perspective by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions

Associate Research Director
Quadrant Solutions

Accelerate Cloud-Native Transformation with HCL SoFy

In our three-part blog series on cloud-native application, the first blog titled “Is Cloud Native the Answer to Being Customer-Centric?” focused on how a cloud-native strategy helps organizations build a solid foundation for customer-centricity. In this blog, we bring significant perspectives on the need for adopting cloud-native transformation and the challenges it poses. We also review HCL SoFy, the cloud-native solution factory for HCLSoftware.

Based on several studies conducted by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, it is established that customers expect brands to offer a highly personalized and consistent experience across all sales and interaction channels in the current digital-first economy. Driven by a dynamic business environment and growing competition, retailers are transforming their commerce operations and increasingly investing in providing a seamless customer experience across an omnichannel environment. Retailers with a legacy technology stack lack the necessary business agility and are often facing challenges in retaining their market share and customer loyalty. Therefore, cloud-native technologies are not merely an emerging trend but are increasingly becoming a part of organizations’ core strategy across their cloud and application transformation projects. The cloud-native strategy involves building a set of modern, microservices-based future-ready applications and modernizing existing applications, enabling organizations to exploit emerging market and technology trends.

Cloud-Native Solutions Impact Business Innovation

In most organizations, the pace of innovation and business strategy is often linked with the competencies and deployment timelines set by IT teams. However, a cloud-native solution follows DevOps principles and leverages automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes to significantly accelerate software delivery cycles from months and years to hours and days. Consequently, enterprises are increasingly moving towards modern cloud-native environments to improve business agility, scalability, faster time-to-market, and reliability.

The Journey to Cloud-Native Brings New Challenges

The journey towards cloud-native transformation poses significant changes for organizations. Adopting a cloud-native strategy requires leadership buy-in and demand for a major cultural shift on how organizations develop, deploy, and operate business applications and services. What is clear is that cloud native delivers major benefits compared to either first generation cloud or solutions using a legacy monolithic architecture. Since cloud-native is still an emerging phenomenon from a technology lifecycle and maturity perspective, organizations may face challenges associated with scarcity of skilled resources with necessary domain expertise and experience.

However, the long-term and sustainable benefit from adopting cloud-native fat outweigh the initial learning curve. What it needs is the right technology and implementation partner who can help organizations significantly reduce the initial learning curve while realizing the full potential of the same. DevOps professionals face challenges in implementing cloud-native strategy due to a lack of skills, expertise, and experience required for cloud-native infrastructure, solutions, and services.

Figure: Challenges and Strategies for Effective Implementation of Cloud-Native Strategy

People, Process, Technology, and Strategy Perspectives

People	Process	Technology	Strategy
The cloud-native strategy requires leadership buy-in and demand for a major cultural shift on how organizations develop, deploy, and operate business applications and services.	Due to the status of cloud-native as an emerging technology, organizations are often facing challenges in identifying industry best practices, architectural standards, and case examples for effective implementation.	Migration from traditional on-premises and multi-tenant SaaS environments to cloud-native requires significant transformation across technology-stake and the organization’s culture.	HCL SoFy, a cloud-native solution factory, is designed to help organizations accelerate the deployment of HCLSoftware products across the public, private, and hybrid cloud environment.
DevOps professionals face challenges in implementing cloud-native strategy due to a lack of skills, expertise, and experience required for cloud-native infrastructure, solutions, and services.	Cloud-native transformations with microservices architecture are associated with complexities of service connectivity, API management, API security, networking infrastructure and monitoring, and others.	Organizations must manage multiple complexities across technology platforms, business models, operating models, governance, infrastructure management, and security.	HCL Now, a cloud native-as-a-service solution, offers technical expert assistance enabling organizations to transition to cloud-native with reduced risks and optimize its benefits.

HCL SoFy: The Cloud-Native Solution Factory

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions recently reviewed HCL SoFy, the cloud-native solution factory, and HCL Now, a cloud native-as-a-service offering. HCL is focused on solving their customers’ most pressing challenges, such as:

Accelerating cloud-native application deployments
Overcoming technology barriers towards implementing a cloud-native strategy
Lack of necessary domain expertise and experience

HCL SoFy helps organizations accelerate the deployment of HCLSoftware products across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. The solution supports all Kubernetes environments to provide enterprise-grade scalability and automate application deployment. With Helm technology, HCL SoFy provides HCL product components and RESTful APIs in the form of cloud-ready building blocks. It allows customers to explore the software catalog and create a no-code solution to enable the deployment of cloud-native applications within the span of a few hours. At present, HCL SoFy offers over 50 product components, 2000+ REST APIs, and over 40 cloud-native demos. The solution also allows customers to build and test their industry-specific and organization-specific cloud-native solutions in a sandbox environment before actual deployment to avoid technical and operational risks. With HCL SoFy’s no-code approach, the DevOps team can effectively migrate to a cloud-native environment without the need for writing codes and technical expertise on cloud-native infrastructure and processes.

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions lauds HCL’s innovative approach in leading the cloud-native space, thereby helping its existing customers in their journey towards cloud-native transformation while building the foundational platform for future customers.

As a part of this three-part blog series on cloud-native application, the next blog will cover Quadrant’s review on HCL Now, a cloud-native-as-a-service solution.

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Shruti Jadhav

Associate Research Director
Quadrant Solutions

Shruti Jadhav is an Associate Research Director at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions. She is responsible for planning, managing and conducting global strategic market outlook, market insights, technology guide, SPARK Matrix analysis, and user consulting assignments. Shruti’s research focus areas include retail and eCommerce, customer experience, digital commerce, marketing technology, and such others. Shruti is also a part of user and vendor consulting group that focuses on delivering various consulting projects, including technology architecture planning, vendor/technology selection strategies, operational due diligence, and custom market intelligence. As part of the global Megatrends and industry convergence analysis, Shruti is tracking the impact of advanced analytics, AI, ML, and automation technologies on global technology developments and its overall market impact.