Computerwoche Germany has organized this week the second annual BestInCloud Award. I had the honor to be on a jury for this unique award again. The BestInCloud Award is really unique, as it does not simply compare cloud products. It is looking at successful implementations of real cloud projects in Germany. The balance of great customer value AND a good leverage of an underlying cloud IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS is the secret source to convince the jury. I'd like to congratulate this year's winners and share with you what impressed me personally most with these projects:

 

SaaS – Public Cloud: arvato systems GmbH 

Customer: Janssen KG

Project: farmpilot – mobile farm management 

This project was the only SaaS application heavily leveraging mobile access to the cloud in addition to bringing multiple companies, including farmers, contractors, and agricultural traders, together in a way it would never be possible if a single company owned a system on premises.

 

SaaS – Privat Cloud: Plex Systems, Inc.
Customer: Inteva Products, Inc.
Projekt: Inteva Products, Inc. implemented an integrated ERP system for manufacturing

This project was really impressive to me, as it uses a real-time integration of multiple participants in a supply chain in a way an on-premises product could hardy achieve. This comes close to Forrester’s vision of Business Networks in the cloud.

 

SaaS – Hybrid Cloud: EURO-LOG AG
Customer: Tech Data GmbH & Co. OHG
Project: ONE TRACK – complete order and shipping transparence

I found it impressive how the technology of software agents, which is around for years, was finally turned into a compelling customer value. The project aggregates the track ’n trace data from multiple logistics firms, normalizes the semantics, and presents it in context of existing customer systems — a great example of a cloud and on-premises hybrid solution.

 

IaaS – Public Cloud: ProfitBricks GmbH 
Customer: IBN Distribution GmbH
Project: IBN.Cloud Managed Services hosted by ProfitBricks

ProfitBricks developed a leading-edge tooling for software-defined data centers in a way the customer could if it was full self-service. If you have multiple web-, app-, database- and other servers that you like to orchestrate into a virtual data center with an understanding of the relations, this solution is the most compelling option of all award participants, and most likely in Europe overall!

 

IaaS – Private Cloud: fluid Operations AG 
Customer: PfalzKom, Gesellschaft für Telekommunikation mbH
Project: PfalzKom: Storage and IaaS for a local ISP

Many local internet service providers (ISPs) do offer some IaaS services like storage-as-a-service. So, what’s compelling here? The project impressed with very little individual development by the ISP and a great usage of the powerful tools of fluid Operations. Fully leveraging the self-service portal of fluid ops turned an enterprise storage solution into a consumerized storage service.

 

PaaS: Fabasoft 
Customer: Multiple car manufacturers and suppliers integrated by SSC GmbH
Project: International certificate management to comply with import restrictions.

Imagine the financial damage of a shipload of nice Germany cars exported to China, but sent back from a Chinese harbor because of missing certificate documents! SSC GmbH brought multiple companies together and leveraged Fabasoft’s foliocloud to bring unstructured and structured data into workflows and Agile-developed business logic. Impressive leverage of Fabasoft’s PaaS.

 

Cloud Transformation Services: 7Business Consulting AG 
Referenzkunde: Daimler AG
Projekt: CLOUD OPERATIONAL READINESS

7Business Consulting impressed with a great consulting approach — backed by some early versions of tools — to help customers on their journey into cloud infrastructure and applications. Leveraging the lessons learned of 10 years of SOA was very compelling.

 

Best Business Idea: Seeburger AG 
Customer: VOLTARIS GmbH
Projekt: Electricity market data exchange.

The electricity market is one of the most time-critical trading markets. Although technically not revolutionary, Seeburger combined their decades of B2B knowledge with an impressive understanding of the energy industry and offers their services in true cloud economics.

 

Innovation Award: Onephone 
Customer: Medica-Technik GmbH
Project: integrated UC solutions leveraging mobile GSM technology.

The Onephone service is following true opex-cloud economics and uses a compelling approach to mobile unified communication. To bring the mobile-in-office connectivity down to a price even below traditional on-premises telecommunication, Onephone implemented for Medica-Technik an own local GSM cell, fully managed as a cloud service. Cool idea!

 

Audience-Voting: SSP/Fujitsu 
Customer: MEILLERGHP GmbH
Project: Dedicated Secure Data Space

Although the jury was not most impressed by this solution, the immediate customer value was compelling enough for most people onsite to vote for it. Great vote!

 

Congratulations again to all customers, systems integrators, and cloud-product vendors. Finally, a huge thank you to all finalists who attended the event and put a lot of effort in their presentations. The real customer projects brought outstanding content quality to the show! 

See you again next year . . .

Stefan Ried