The cloud has emerged as a transformative technology platform, offering flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness. Enterprise cloud migration strategies seek to be business-driven with an integrated technology, operational and financial adoption plan. Knowing where you are, where you are going, and how you get there is critical to sustainable success. Building an end-to-end plan with confidence can be a daunting undertaking, and enterprise leaders find it challenging to design and execute a cloud migration plan. To address these challenges, we continue to expand our Migration Acceleration Program to help clients assess, plan and migrate their infrastructure to IBM Cloud®.

Migrating to IBM Cloud with confidence

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program is designed to address the need for a simplified, accelerated evaluation and decision-making process for migrating to IBM Cloud. The Migration Acceleration Program aims to help clients make more informed decisions in supporting their technology transformation. Our goal is to meet clients where they are in their journey with a shared success engagement model to accelerate, simplify and accelerate the evaluation and planning process for migrating to IBM Cloud. Today the Migration Acceleration Program provides technology accelerators and cloud credits for IBM Power Virtual Server, IBM Cloud for VMWare and IBM Cloud for SAP solutions as explained below.

Proof of concept and migration funding incentives

IBM provides financial incentives in the form of IBM Cloud credits for qualified clients[1], covering 100% of the Proof of Value or Proof of Concept costs. For clients in the IBM Enterprise Savings Plan, financial incentives are also available to help offset up to 80% of the migration cost.

Engagement model for facilitating transformation

Timely, Structured and Streamlined: Cloud transformation can be complex and a multi-year journey. To address risk and facilitate transformation, clients need to plan for incremental outcomes across each transformation phase. The Migration Acceleration Program engagement model guides clients through a structured process that includes: 1. assess or plan, 2. validate the plan and 3. prepare for build and migrate. Our goal is to enable clients with a transformation plan that includes prescriptive guidance, comprehensive planning artifacts and workshops, technology automation accelerators and proof-of-value or proof-of-concept funding, with strategic support from IBM onboarding and migration specialists.

Introducing the new Center of Excellence (COE) for IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) providing expertise and technology accelerators for cloud migration of IBM AIX and IBM i environments. The COE team has designed a step-by-step engagement model for IBM Power to PowerVS migrations to accelerate client’s proof-of-value or proof-of-concept journey, with the goal of validating the migration plan.

The Cloud Migration Acceleration Program empowers businesses to assess, plan, validate the plan and migrate their workloads to the cloud. With IBM’s expertise, incentives and methodologies our goal is to enable our clients to accelerate and simplify transformation on IBM Cloud.

Next steps

To learn more about the IBM Cloud Migration Acceleration Program, contact Bill Singleton (Vice President, Cloud Deployment & Onboarding) or Rob Centra (Program Director, IBM Cloud Delivery).

[1] The qualification is based on a minimum deal size of USD 150K ACV.