Constellation ShortList™ Digital Transformation Target Platforms

About This Constellation ShortList™

A digital transformation target platform is an enterprise-class suite of technology capabilities aimed at addressing most of the needs of organizations that are reorganizing around strategic new digital products and services. Such target platforms provide robust and mature primary technologies for the public cloud as well as higher-order cloud services, including support for digital business models such as e-commerce, subscriptions and open APIs. Digital transformation target platforms form a top-to-bottom digital business stack, along with a clear proven path from strategy and transformation to migration and operations.

Solution must also help with delivering customer experience in the target platform to reflect the top priority that most CxOs currently have placed on modernizing their market-facing digital capabilities.

These platforms differentiate from a pure-play enterprise public cloud platform or a managed cloud service by providing digital business transformation capabilities such as industry accelerators, digital business reference models/blueprints, low-code support, business models-in-a-box, design thinking support, migration tools/services and other means of enabling the overall digital transformation process.

These platforms have global presence with regulatory and compliance support across most of the globe. They also have the ability to support the scale and combined transformational/operational needs of enterprise organizations of the largest size and complexity. Included platforms s upport most of the key emerging technologies enterprises will need to adopt. Examples: Next-gen mobility, advanced analytics, Internet of Things, AI, blockchain and microservices.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Mature enterprise-class public cloud capabilities (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, managed services)
• Helps realize digital business models, customer experience and operations
• Supports the digital transformation process di- rectly in a meaningful way
• Focuses on business outcomes as much as technology transformation
• Regularly incorporates contemporary emerging technologies
• Tends to favor open source and open standards
• Production scalable and secure on more than three continents
• Supports global data protection standards
• Ability to help manage and control cloud operating costs
• Vendor offering maturity, stability and industry staying power