Listen to the podcast.
Find it on iTunes.
Download
the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello,
and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst
podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the
latest insights into successful digital
transformation.
 |
| Gardner |
This hybrid IT management
strategies interview explores new ways that businesses should procure and
consume IT-as-a-service. We’ll now hear from an IT industry analyst on why changes
in cloud deployment models are forcing a rethinking of IT economics, and maybe
even the very nature of acquiring and cost-optimizing digital business services.
Here to help us explore the everything-as-a-service
business model is Rhett Dillingham,
Vice President and Senior Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.
Welcome back, Rhett.
Rhett Dillingham: Hi, Dana.
It’s good to be here.
Gardner: What is
driving change in the procurement of hybrid- and multi-cloud
services?
Dillingham: What began as organic adoption -- from the developers and business units seeking agility and speed -- is now coming back around to the IT-focused topics of governance, orchestration across platforms, and modernization of private infrastructure.
There is also interest in hybrid
cloud, as well as multi-cloud
management and governance. Those amount to complexities
that the public clouds are not set up for and are not able to address
because they are focused on their own platforms.
Learn How to
Better Manage
Better Manage
Gardner: So
the way you acquire IT these days isn’t apples or oranges, public or private,
it’s more like … fruit salad. There are so many different ways to acquire IT
services that it’s hard to measure and to optimize.
 |
| Dillingham |
Dillingham: And there
are trade-offs. Some organizations are focused on and adopt a single public
cloud vendor. But others see that as a long-term risk in management, resourcing,
and maintaining flexibility as a business. So they’re adopting multiple cloud
vendors, which is becoming the more popular strategic orientation.
Gardner: For
those organizations that don’t want mismanaged “fruit salad” -- that are trying
to homogenize their acquisition of IT services even as they use hybrid cloud
approaches -- does this require a reevaluation of how IT in total is financed?
Champion the cloud
Dillingham: Absolutely,
and that’s something you can address, regardless of whether you’re adopting a
single cloud or multiple clouds. The more you use multiple resources, the more you
are going to consider tools that address multiple infrastructures -- and not base
your capabilities on a single vendor’s toolset. You are going to go with a
cloud management vendor that produces tools
that comprehensively address security, compliance, cost management, and monitoring,
et cetera.
Gardner: Does
the function of IT acquisitions now move outside of IT? Should companies be
thinking about a chief procurement officer (CPO) or chief financial officer (CFO)
becoming a part of the IT purchasing equation?
Dillingham: By
virtue of the way cloud has been adopted -- more by the business units – they
got ahead of IT in many cases. This has been pushed back toward gaining the fuller
financial view. That move doesn’t make the IT decision-maker into a CFO as much
as turn them into a champion of IT. And IT goes back to being the governance arm,
where traditionally they been managing cost, security, and compliance.
It’s natural for the business
units and developers to now look
to IT for the right tools and capabilities, not necessarily to shed
accountability but because that is the traditional role of IT, to enable those capabilities.
IT is therefore set up for procurement.
IT is best set up to look at
the big picture across vendors and across infrastructures rather than the
individual team-by-team or business unit-by-business unit decisions that have
been made so far. They need to aggregate the cloud strategy at the highest organizational
level.
Gardner: A central
tenet of good procurement is to look for volume discounts and to buy in bulk. Perhaps
having that holistic and strategic approach to acquiring cloud services lends
itself to a better bargaining position?
Dillingham: That’s
absolutely the pitch of a cloud-by-cloud vendor approach, and there are trade-offs.
You can certainly aggregate more spend on a single cloud vendor and potentially
achieve more discounts in use by that aggregation.
The rebuttal is that on a long-term
basis, your negotiating leverage in that relationship is constrained versus if
you have adopted multiple cloud infrastructures and can dialogue across vendors
on pricing and discounting.
Now, that may turn into more
of an 80/20-, 90/10-split than a 50/50-split, but at least by having some cross-infrastructure
capability -- by setting yourself up with orchestration, monitoring, and governance
tools that run across multiple clouds -- you are at least in a strategic
position from a competitive sourcing perspective.
The trade-off is the cost-aggregation
and training
necessary to understand how to use those different infrastructures --
because they do have different interfaces, APIs, and the automation is
different.
Gardner: I
think that’s why we’ve seen vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
put an increased emphasis on multi-cloud
economics, and not just the capability to compose cloud services. The
issues we’re bringing up force IT to rethink the financial implications, too. Are
the vendors on to something here when it comes to providing insight and experience
in managing a multi-cloud market?
Follow the multi-cloud tour guide
Dillingham: Absolutely,
and certainly from the perspective that when we talk multi-cloud, we are not
just talking multiple public clouds. There is a reality of large existing
investments in private infrastructure that continue for various purposes. That
on-premises technology also needs cost optimization, security, compliance, auditability,
and customization of infrastructure for certain workloads.
Consultative
input is very valuable when you see how much pattern-matching there is
across customers -- and not just within the same industry but cross
industries.
And that consultative input is
very valuable when you see how much pattern-matching there is across customers
– and not just within same industry but across industries. The best insights
will come from knowing what it looks like to triage application portfolios,
what migrations you want across cloud infrastructures, and the proper set up of
comprehensive governance, control processes, and education structures.
That’s more intelligent than
trying to do this on your own or go down a dark alley and make mistakes, because
as we know, the cloud providers are probably not going to stand up and wave a
flag if you’re spending too much money with them.
Dillingham: Yes,
and the patterns of progression in cloud orientation are clear for those consultative
partners, based on dozens of implementations and executions. From that experience
they are far more thoroughly aware of the patterns and how to avoid falling
into the traps and pitfalls along the way, more so than a single organization could
expect, internally, to be savvy about.
Gardner: It’s
a fast-moving target. The cloud providers are bringing out new services all the
time. There are literally thousands of different cloud service SKUs
for infrastructure-as-a-service, for storage-as-a-service, and for other APIs
and third-party services. It becomes very complex, very dynamic.
Do you have any advice for how
companies should be better managing cloud adoption? It seems to me there should
be collaboration at a higher level, or a different type of management, when it
comes to optimizing
for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud economics.
Cloud collaboration strategy
Dillingham: That really comes back to the requirement that the IT
organization partner with the business units. The more business units there are
in the organization, the more IT is critical in driving collaboration at the
highest organizational level and in being responsible for the overall cloud
strategy.
The cloud strategy
across the topics of platform selection, governance, process, and people skills
-- that’s the type of collaboration needed. And it flows into these
recommendations from the consultancies of how to avoid the traps and pitfalls.
For example: Avoiding mismanagement of expectations and goals in order to drive
clear outcomes on the execution of projects, making
sure that security and compliance are considered and involved from a functional
perspective all the way through, and on down the list.
The decision of what advice to
bring in is really about the topic and the selection on the menu. Have you considered
the uber strategy and approach? How well have you triaged your application
portfolio? How can you best match capabilities to apps across infrastructures
and platforms?
Do you have migration planning? How about migration execution? Those can be similar or separate items. You also have development methodologies, and the software platform choices to best support all of that along with security and compliance expertise. These are all aspects certain consultancies will have expertise on more than others, and not many are going to be strong across all of them.
Gardner: It certainly
sounds like a lot of planning and perhaps reevaluating the ways of the past. I’m
afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring new ways that
businesses can procure and consume IT-as-a-service, and we have
learned why changes in cloud deployment models are forcing a rethinking of IT
economics in general.
Please join me in thanking out
guest, Rhett Dillingham, Vice President and Senior Analyst at Moor Insights and
Strategy. Thank you, sir.
Dillingham: Great
to be with you, Dana.
Gardner: And a
big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Analyst hybrid IT management strategies interview. I’m Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions.
Thanks again for listening.
Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes.
Download
the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript
of a discussion on why
changes in cloud deployment models are forcing a rethinking of IT economics,
and maybe even the very nature of acquiring and cost optimizing digital
services. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.
You may also be
interested in:
- Manufacturer gains advantage by expanding IoT footprint from many machines to many insights
- Why enterprises struggle with adopting public cloud as a culture
- Who, if anyone, is in charge of multi-cloud business optimization?
- A discussion with IT analyst Martin Hingley on the culmination of 30 years of IT management maturity
- How global HCM provider ADP mines an ocean of employee data for improved talent management
- Inside story: How HP Inc. moved from a rigid legacy to data center transformation
- Dark side of cloud—How people and organizations are unable to adapt to improve the business
- Better management of multicloud IaaS proves accelerant to developer productivity for European gaming leader Magellan Robotech
- Ryder Cup provides extreme use case for managing the digital edge for 250K mobile golf fans
No comments:
Post a Comment