Migrations of systems from on-site premises to the cloud has been a fundamental endeavor by many industrial institutions. A crucial component of such cloud migrations is the transition of databases to be hosted online. In this work, we consider the difficulties of this migration for SQL databases. While SQL is one of the prominent methods for storing database procedures, there are a plethora of different SQL dialects (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, etc.) which can complicate migrations when the on-premise SQL dialect differs to the dialect hosted on the cloud. Tools exist by common cloud provides such as AWS and Azure to aid in translating between dialects in order to mitigate the majority of the difficulties. However, these tools do not successfully translate $100\%$ of the code. Consequently, software engineers must manually convert the remainder of the untranslated database. For large organizations, this task quickly becomes intractable and so more innovative solutions are required. We consider this challenge a novel yet vital industrial research problem for any large corporation that is considering cloud migrations. Furthermore, we introduce potential avenues of research to tackle this challenge that have yielded promising preliminary results.

This designation recognizes that vFunction has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success automating and accelerating customer application migration and modernization journeys. AWS launched the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency to allow customers to easily and confidently engage highly specialized AWS Partners that help AWS customers modernize their applications, either before or after they are moved to AWS. The AWS Migration and Modernization Competency takes on the heavy lifting of identifying and validating industry leaders with proven customer success and technical proficiency in migration and application modernization tooling. This lets enterprises breathe new life into their legacy applications, and refactor old code for new cloud environments. The vFunction patented and award winning platform first analyzes monolithic applications and allows architects to automate and accelerate the re-architecting and rewriting of their legacy Java and .NET applications into microservices.

Contact centers are evolving rapidly. The days of single-channel, telephony-based call centers are long gone. This old model has given way to the omnichannel customer experience center. In legacy call centers, the customer's pathway through sales or service was relatively linear. Call in, speak to an agent, and (hopefully) resolve the issue.

This blog post is co-authored by Vittorio Accomazzi, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at IMS. This blog is part of a series in collaboration with our partners and customers leveraging the newly announced Azure Health Data Services. Azure Health Data Services, a platform as a service (PaaS) offering designed to support Protected Health Information (PHI) in the cloud, is a new way of working with unified data--providing care teams with a platform to support both transactional and analytical workloads from the same data store and enabling cloud computing to transform how we develop and deliver AI across the healthcare ecosystem. The first implementation of digital imaging techniques in clinical use started in the 1970s. Since then, the medical imaging industry has grown exponentially--over the last two and a half decades, there has been a significant development in image acquisition solutions, which has boosted image quality and adoption in different clinical applications.

As more businesses adopt cloud services at a greater scale, the need to leverage AI and automation for cloud migration success has increased. This article explores the move to the cloud, how businesses can leverage AI and automation to support this, while also looking at what success looks like in a cloud migration. Businesses are moving critical workloads to the cloud at an accelerated rate. This trend was sped up during the pandemic, but the dial was always moving in this direction. The reason for this, according to Rob Duffy – head of solution development at Cloudreach – is that the move to the cloud "allows businesses to be more agile and respond faster to changing customer conditions and customer expectations."

Every chief executive is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Regardless of the chosen approach, which will vary, technology executives understand they must accelerate digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. This is driving a dramatic shift in information technology investments at the macro level as we expect total spending to increase at 8% in 2021, a big turnaround from last year's contraction. Investments in cybersecurity, cloud, collaboration to enable hybrid work and data, including analytics, artificial intelligence and automation are the top spending priorities for CxOs. In this post we'll share some takeaways from ETR's latest survey and provide our commentary on what it means for markets, sellers and buyers. We'll also explain what we think Wall Street is missing about Amazon's latest earnings.

Analytics leader SAS continues to innovate by making it easier to access its powerful, cloud-native SAS Viya platform. Recent product developments help customers more efficiently democratize analytics throughout their organizations while seamlessly managing analytic workloads and building SAS into a variety of applications. "Among analytics providers, SAS is a recognized leader for reimagining the way analytics and machine learning are consumed so users realize optimal results that solve business challenges faster with more accuracy," said Ritu Jyoti, Program Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Research at IDC. "This iteration of the SAS Viya platform gives users at all levels of an organization an agile, powerful advanced machine learning engine to help master the complex data that's in cloud environments." Recognizing that so many organizations have struggled with the global pandemic and its effects, SAS CEO and founder Jim Goodnight says SAS Viya can help in the toughest times. "SAS Viya helps organizations see their data, customers and operations in new ways that encourage confident decision making," said Goodnight.

Emerging technology spend will give way to cloud and productivity software, according to Spiceworks Ziff Davis 2021 State of IT report. Enterprise technology felt the jolt of COVID-19, bringing priority tasks to the top and accelerating trends underway prior to disruption. The pivot to remote work and the financial pressures in the pandemic made value the keyword for enterprise technology, altering how executives gauge return on investment. After crisis mode subsided, shrinking budgets needed to stretch further. Tech spend is "so important for business continuity and business operations that they've become a mission-critical part of the budget" even in the context of future financial downturns, said Robin Peto, director of research strategy at Spiceworks Ziff Davis.

As enterprises consider how they might take advantage of adopting a hybrid cloud approach, AI may be poised to accelerate and shake up the possibilities, says Ruchir Puri, chief scientist with IBM Research. Known for his work with IBM Watson, Puri discussed with InformationWeek how IBM is approaching the digital era, hybrid cloud, and AI. This includes evolving AI technology born out of Watson and teaching AI to essentially speak code. Puri's team works on AI technology to assist with data migration from legacy systems and languages such as COBOL to the cloud, and he says AI augmentation could boost productivity through automation of IT. How did AI become part of IBM's plans for the cloud?

But the drawbacks of not making the investment to rebuild your legacy apps for the cloud means technological debt, competitive disadvantages in agility and frustrated customers left suffering poor user experiences. Organisations need to decide which applications to move to the cloud and which to keep on-premise. Then, they must decide how to refactor those apps with cloud-native technologies or create a hybrid-cloud setup - it's a complicated process. Successful cloud migrations and transformation rely on automating continuous builds, integration and delivery as well as automating performance monitoring, root-cause analysis and remediation. Together with this'automate everything' approach is leveraging AI.