HPE Accelerates its Sustainability Goals While Improving the Impact of IT on the Environment and Society

Transcript of a discussion on how Hewlett Packard Enterprise has newly accelerated its many programs and initiatives to reduce its carbon emissions, conserve energy, and reduce waste. 

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 podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the impact of information technology (IT) on the environment and society.

Gardner

As businesses worldwide seek to maximize their value to their customers and communities, the total value equation has expanded to now include the impact on sustainability for the environment.

The ways that companies, along with their partners, suppliers, and employees best manage and govern their resources and assets speaks volumes about their place among peers. And it allows them to take a leadership position as stewards and protectors of the future. The sooner the world’s industries develop a commitment to reach a net-zero carbon emissions posture, for example, the better for everyone in gaining environmental sustainability.

Stay with us now as we examine how Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has newly accelerated its many programs and initiatives to reduce its carbon emissions, conserve energy, and reduce waste -- including far earlier net-zero dates and more impactful emission-reduction milestones. We’ll now learn how HPE’s newest living progress report provides a blueprint for other organizations in and outside of the HPE orbit to also hasten and improve their sustainability efforts.

Here to share the latest on HPE’s plans and goals for broad and lasting sustainability is John Frey, Chief Technologist, Sustainable Transformation at HPE. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, John.

John Frey: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Gardner: How does HPE define ESG and how long has it been working toward improving its impacts across these goals?

Frey: To make sure everyone knows what we mean when we say ESG, that’s actually an acronym for environmental, social, and corporate governance. This is language that was first used by investors in the financial community, and now it’s used much more broadly to emphasize that when we discuss sustainability. We mean more than just the environmental aspects. We mean the social aspects as well.

Frey

From HPE’s perspective, we’ve named our ESG programs Living Progress, and that’s really our business strategy for creating sustainable and equitable technology solutions for a data-first world. These efforts are tied to our corporate strategy and our purpose, which is to advance the way people live and work.

Our programs go back many, many years. In fact, back in 1957 when our program started, the program was called Corporate Citizenship and it was based around how HPE would grow beyond the borders of the United States. We have a long history of leadership as Hewlett Packard. When Hewlett Packard and Hewlett Packard Enterprise became two separate companies, we adapted the best practices at that point in time and then built our LivingProgress programs around that.

Our programs today have three main elements -- driving a low carbon economy, investing in people, and operating with integrity. We have goals across that entire spectrum of sustainability and throughout the lifecycle of our products.

Gardner: It’s very impressive that you have been doing this for going on 65 years. How has the world changed more recently that has prompted you to accelerate, to even dig in deeper on your commitments here? 

Frey: Climate change is one of the greatest threats to our common future. We recognize that we have limited resources and lots of impacts that are complex societal and environmental challenges. At HPE, we believe that addressing climate change is not only a moral imperative; it is also a business opportunity as we innovate technology to help our customers thrive in this carbon-constrained world.

Years ago, we set our goal to be net-zero by 2050, and it was backed up by science-based targets throughout our entire value chain. When we set this goal, it was clear leadership. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s most recent reports indicate that going to net-zero by 2050 is not fast enough. We have to accelerate our goals.

HPE has committed to becoming a net-zero enterprise across our entire value chain by 2040. Our commitment is backed by our roadmap to net-zero, which consists of a science-based targets.

Therefore, HPE has committed to becoming a net-zero enterprise across our entire value chain by 2040. Our commitment is backed by our roadmap to net-zero, which consists of a new suite of science-based targets that are consistent with that one-and-a-half-degree pathway and approved by the Science Based Target Initiative.

We set those interim targets and longer-term targets. Our interim targets for 2030 include reducing our scope-one and scope-two emissions by 70 percent and reducing our absolute scope-three emissions by 42 percent, both off of a 2020 baseline. And that scope-three target includes the use of our products by our customers, upstream transportation and distribution, and scopes one and two supplier emissions. Our longer-term target for 2040 is to reduce the absolute scopes one, two and three emissions by 90 percent off of that 2020 baseline as well.

Getting to these targets will require a fundamental transformation in everything we do. Our leaders need to be accountable for driving this and we’ve tied key climate metrics to executive compensation. We will need to ‘walk the talk’ and procure 100 percent renewable energy for our own operations while at the same time helping our customers and suppliers bring new renewables to the grid where they operate.

And most importantly, we’ll enable our customers to meet their own net-zero ambitions. This is important, because about two-thirds of our climate impact on the globe occurs when our customers use our technology solutions. So HPE is putting our innovation engine into action to develop more sustainable IT solutions while working closely with our customers to help optimize their IT infrastructure so that they can meet their own net-zero goals.

Gardner: That’s very interesting when you say nearly two-thirds of the climate impacts happen in your customer base from the use of your solutions. Can you expand on that? What does that mean?

Sustainability demands change

Frey: When we think about our footprint across the company, a small single-digit percentage is because of our own operations, our buildings and our employees and employee travel and those sorts of things. Around a third of it then is our supply chain – when we bring products to the market and when we take those products back from customers at their end of life. But the bulk, nearly two-thirds of our climate impact on the globe is when our customers use our technology products.

Learn More About

HPE's Living Progress Initiatives.

For us to help our customers get to net-zero and for HPE to lower our own carbon emissions across our entire portfolio means that we really must help our customers use their technology more efficiently. So that really gets to things such as helping them right-size the amount of technology they have, increasing the performance they get from the technology for each watt. We have to help them continue to optimize in real time their technology so that it uses the lowest amount of energy and does the most work at the same time.

Gardner: It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s technology that’s going to come to our aid, but it’s technology that we need to, in a sense, solve.

Frey: Absolutely. In fact, we think of technology as a force multiplier for solving climate challenges. Technology really enables a lot of these solutions, and it also facilitates a lot of clean energy innovation as well.

Gardner: What are some of the major hurdles that need to be overcome to achieve this? It’s quite a bit to bite off and chew.

Frey: Yes, absolutely. Experts estimate that about half of the carbon reductions that the world needs to achieve net-zero emissions in the coming decade will come from technologies that don’t even exist yet. So that’s challenging. And in fact, if we look at just the companies that have made net-zero commitments already, we don’t have enough capability in terms of renewable energy and carbon offsets and things to even cover those commitments.

Technology can be an enabler here. HPE is spending a tremendous amount of effort innovating with solutions such as HPC technologies that are used by climate scientists and clean energy researchers.

So that is a huge challenge, but technology can be such an enabler there. HPE is spending a tremendous amount of effort innovating with solutions such as our high performance computing technologies that are used by climate scientists and by clean-energy researchers who are trying to find better ways to bring those solutions to market. With our customers, who are using our professional services and our technology services, instead of buying assets, we help them right-size the technology they need, we help them manage their technology from the edge to the cloud and optimize all the way through that.

Lots of opportunity. I prefer to think in terms of the positive, rather than the hurdles, which I think of as business opportunities. But what I can say from my experience working with our customers around the globe is many of our customers are really fixated on trying to help solve these challenges, many of our customers see great business opportunities in trying to help fix these challenges, and they’re all turning to technology as the enabler of that innovation.

Gardner: Yes. I’ve heard it said elsewhere. You can do quite well as a business by doing good for sustainability in the economy.

Frey: Absolutely. We fully agree with that.

Gardner: It seems like HPE has taken quite a lead here, but it involves more than just you the company. It affects your supply chains, as you’ve mentioned, your customers, your partners. So how do you characterize HPE’s role in that larger community?  Are you an example to follow, maybe a facilitator, an educator accelerating growth of potential, or all of the above?

Our example: Fail fast, then innovate again

Frey: We really play all of those roles. In some cases, we are an example that others point to and say, “Hey, we’re not going down this path alone. HPE has gone down this path.” In many cases, we’re an educator and will share with customers this long sustainability journey that we’ve been on, the lessons we learned. Often, it’s better to learn from what someone who has been down the path said they would never do again, or what they learned from their journey. We so often focus as a sustainability community on the things that went well. Yet, there’s a lot of lessons learned, and we really try from an HPE perspective to take a ‘fail fast and then innovate again’ approach. We’re constantly learning, and that education has great value.

In many cases, there’s a need for a facilitator. We know that these challenges exist across many industries, but there isn’t a central body pulling together multiple stakeholders and multiple customers to help solve that challenge. A couple of examples of that are organizations such as the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA).That’s an organization that HPE helped found years ago. We realized when we were auditing factories in our supply chain that these factories were building products for other technology companies as well. So, the factories were following our expectations in the lines building HPE products but may not have been protecting workers adequately in some of the other lines. When we took a step back and said, “Well, why is that?” We were told, well, that other vendor doesn’t make us do these things, and we said, “Well, wait a minute. That’s actually not the right answer.”

If we’re really trying to make sure that workers in our supply chain are being treated fairly, paid a living wage, have their health and safety protected, and are protecting the environment that’s a non-competitive issue. So, we took a step back and formed what was then called the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and invited companies in our industry to come together to have a common set of expectations for our suppliers and then put in place assurance programs. Well, that was so successful, other industries came to us and said, “Could we adopt that same practice for our industry?”  Today, the organization that does all of that is called the Responsible Business Alliance. And so, it’s having a huge impact on supply chains around the world, but all started because there was that need for a facilitator to bring companies together.

Another great example of that is the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance (CEBA). As more and more companies started making renewable energy commitments, we realized that to get the scale we needed in the pricing for renewable energy, we could do so much together as an alliance, have common procurement expectations and get better pricing.

Learn More About

HPE's Living Progress Initiatives.

One of the ways I talk about it is catalytic collaboration. How do we bring voices to the table that may not have been heard before?  How do we think from an innovation and an accelerator perspective much broader than just for example, publicly traded companies coming together?  How do we bring in the voice of stakeholders and customers and governments?  So, in all of these ways, HPE plays a variety of roles trying to accelerate the world’s progress to solve these big challenges.

Gardner: John, it seems no matter where you live, you’re getting a steady stream of reminders about why this is important. It could be wildfires, hurricanes, permafrost melting, rising sea levels. But on the other hand, this has been a challenge for many of the rates of increase to be met or reduced. So, what are the risks for businesses if they don’t make sustainability a priority?

Ignore environmental impacts at your own risk

Frey: Well, there’s a variety of risks, but let’s start with the business risk. The missed market opportunities. Businesses cost more and they can lose customers. One of the things we know about sustainability is that in many cases it’s about preventing waste, and waste has a cost associated with it. At the same time, we find customers increasingly saying that they want to do business with companies who have strong reputations, who have strong social and environmental programs, and companies that have a purpose and assist in making the world a better place.

In all those ways from a business perspective, customers are watching what companies do, and they’re making purchase decisions based on the attributes of the companies that they want to do business with. Frankly, if you’re not being a sustainability leader or at least keeping up with your industry, you’re going to start missing many of those market opportunities.

Customers are watching what companies do, and they're making purchase decisions based on the attributes of the companies that they want to do business with. If you're not a sustainability leader, you're going to miss market opportunities.

Another one could be, and we hear this from many of our customers, in this increasingly difficult time that we live in, finding employees is very challenging. Employees want to work for a company where they can see how what they’re doing contributes to the company’s purpose. And so that’s another opportunity that they miss.

I’ll just give you a sense. We had International Data Corporation (IDC) do a survey for us last year. We asked technology executives across several countries why they were investing in and participating in sustainable IT and sustainability programs in their technology operations, and what they told us was really interesting. The digital leaders, those companies that are the innovators and the fast movers said that they were investing in sustainability programs to attract and retain institutional investors.

Now, the companies in the middle, the digital mainstream said they were doing it to attract and retain customers and the digital followers. Those companies that move a little slower are not quite as far in their own digital transformation said they were doing it to attract and retain employees. So, there’s a variety of business reasons to do this. Increasingly, there are regulatory reasons as governmental agencies start asking companies to talk about things that are either material from a financial perspective, such as we’re seeing here in the U.S. with the proposed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations or other places around the world where there are regulatory reporting reasons to make sure that you have strong sustainability programs because you have to disclose data to a regulatory agency.

Gardner: Do you have any examples or use cases for how sustainability leadership moves beyond reputation to be a driver of business growth, which, as you said is one of the chief reasons to embrace sustainability fully?

Frey: There are a variety of opportunities. We’ve seen it ourselves. For example, in the last year, we’ve had over 1,400 customer inquiries asking HPE about our own sustainability and social and environmental programs whether it relates to our products or whether it relates to our business. That’s just one example of the way customers are paying attention and they’re asking increasingly in-depth questions. It used to be questions such as, “Do you have your own sustainability program, yes or no?” Then it moved into “Are you using some of the various standards that show us that you’re managing this as a process and as a system across your business?” Now, they’re asking us questions all the way down to “Tell us the carbon footprint of this product or solution that HPE is bringing to the market.”

Now, what we know is when we have good answers to that and we share expertise with customers, we tend to do much better from a business perspective as well, and customers want to do business with us. We certainly see on our own that there are lots of opportunities for additional value by having the strong programs.

Gardner: All right. Are there any even more specific examples of how HPE has helped customers to improve their businesses while also accelerating sustainability improvements? Do we have some concrete examples of how this works in practice?

Win-win: Great business and ESG results

Frey: Yes, I’ll give you just a few. Wibmo is India’s leading digital payment provider, and they use a variety of HPE technologies, but they wanted to consider moving to a much more flexible technology we call HPE Synergy, which is a composable infrastructure. What that really means is that you have compute, storage, and networking in a common chassis that shares power supplies and gives you great scalability. It gives you a pool of resources that the customer can tap from, and what Wibmo really wanted to do was move from a blade infrastructure to that Synergy infrastructure to increase their capability to respond very quickly to changing customer requirements. As we did that for them, to give them the same capability, reduced their IT capital expenditures by 80 percent, reduced their creation and delivery of new accounts from weeks to hours and it lowered their carbon footprint by 50 percent. So, we observed great business outcomes and great environmental outcomes coming from the work with that provider.

Now, another one was Nokia Software, and they’re an HPE GreenLake customer, which is our as-a-service offering. Nokia has always been progressive around their environmental objectives, and they wanted to strive for a carbon-negative data-center operation, and one of the things they wanted to do to achieve that was using a renewable energy source. They wanted to take water from a nearby Finnish lake to cool the data center. They wanted to move to liquid cooling and using renewable energy sources to power that data center. HPE was able to help them do that. One of the great things about HPE GreenLake is that because it’s consumption-based, we help customers tailor the infrastructure to their needs without additional equipment that is sitting there and not doing any work. We enable them to reduce their capital expenses and reduce their environmental footprint at the same time.

Gardner: Let’s talk next about one or two examples of how technology accelerates environmental change, not just from the IT perspective, but perhaps other views that are more data driven and offer the capability to exercise more efficiency, and more ways when you’ve got a data driven organization from edge to Cloud.

Learn More About

HPE's Living Progress Initiatives.

Frey: I’ll give you two quick examples. Purdue University is one, and we’re really partnering with Purdue on sustainable agriculture. One of the challenges we have as a global population is that we’re swelling to about nine-billion people by 2050. And, so, the world is going to have to double our agricultural output or have starvation challenges around the world. Purdue’s College of Agriculture partnered with us to do a variety of research around sustainable agriculture, increasing agricultural output in using edge technologies to allow farmers to really be able to tailor things such as irrigation and fertilization only to the places in their fields that they are absolutely needed. The ultimate goal of this, of course, is to drive more effective ways to grow nutritious, healthy, and abundant food for this growing planet. So that’s one great example and that research continues.

Another great example is Carnegie Clean Energy, and they’re an Australian wave, solar, and battery energy company. But they’re really focused on making wave power a reality. They’ve developed a wave energy technology called CETO that uses the wave energy off Western Australia’s Garden Island to power the country’s largest naval base.

Now, you may not realize that one of the big advantages of wave power is predictability. The sun stops shining at times, the wind stops blowing, but the ocean’s waves don’t stop flowing in. Wave forecasts can look out about a week in the future to figure out how the wave energy is going to be, and they only have about a 20 percent margin of error, which allows CETO to predict how much power is going to be generated looking into the future. It even allows them to tailor the effectiveness of CETO, based on how big or small they predict those waves are going to be. They can generate precise knowledge about the shape and the timing of upcoming waves so that they can make sure they get the maximum amount of energy from each wave that comes in.

Those are two examples of the way we’re using technology for social and environmental good.

Gardner: John, you mentioned, of course, about the long period that HPE has been involved with looking for sustainability and improvement and the impact on its communities, and you’ve just said, “Okay, we were on track, but we’re going to accelerate that. We’re going to move it forward.” How can other companies who might want to decide to accelerate what they’re doing get started? What’s a good way to think about a methodological or comprehensive way to get faster, better, and more impactful when it comes to sustainability?

Partner up for possibility

Frey: The first way we suggest is do a materiality assessment, and that’s talking to your customers, your stakeholders, and your employees about the things that are most relevant to your business and the things that you have the greatest ability to impact. So, figure out what’s most material and publish plans to solve those challenges. In fact, HPE gives an example every year in our Living Progress Report. We publish our own materiality assessment and then show how the initiatives we’re taking are driven straight from that materiality assessment.

Another thing that we would recommend is to learn from leaders. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Companies like HPE freely share this knowledge with our customers, stakeholders, and others in the broader community because we feel that not everybody needs to go back and develop their programs from scratch. Learn from those that have been doing it, learn those lessons and then use that to accelerate your progress.

Learn from the leaders, Don't reinvent the wheel. Companies like HPE freely share their knowledge with our customers, stakeholders, and others in the broader community because we feel that not everybody needs to go back and develop their own programs from scratch.

And finally, partner for success. You don’t have to go it alone. Leverage the expertise throughout your value chain. In HPE’s case, for example, we share our sustainable IT strategy, our white papers and our workbook that helps customers implement a sustainable IT strategy freely, and we put them out on the Internet so that anybody can have access to them and tap into those resources. So, look up and down your value chain and see where there are others that already have that expertise and learn from them. 

Gardner: Before we close out, let’s take advantage of the fact that we must look to current and new technologies to solve these problems. What are some of the future opportunities? Even if we don’t know the how, perhaps we have a sense of the what. What is it that we can be doing in the future to bring these carbon net-zero realities right into our backyards?

Frey: We’ve talked a little bit previously about the fact that we don’t have all the low-carbon solutions we need. And one of the things that HPE did to help with that effort is we co-launched the Low Carbon Patent Pledge. HPE gathered with partners Meta, formerly Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft.

By putting those patents out there, making them freely available, we hope to accelerate the innovation opportunities out there. Perhaps it will be for things that we could have never imagined patents being used for, but some innovator will see a connection and be able to accelerate some new low-carbon solutions. I think there are other ways as well and that we’re seeing a shift from moving in technology from the general compute world to workload specific hardware and software solutions. We’re seeing advances in liquid cooling that are necessary as densities go up, and I think there’s a huge opportunity around software efficiency as well. This is a great untapped opportunity. Yet, some studies say that using a more effective software programming language, such as, for example, Rust, could reduce power consumption by the technology industry by up to 50 percent.

Learn More About

HPE's Living Progress Initiatives.

I think there are opportunities to have common platforms from the edge of the cloud so that we can all see across our technology operations, look at things such as utilization rates, power consumption, carbon emissions, and see those in a common way across that value chain and by being transparent, it highlights opportunities for improvement.

And finally, I think there’s a lot of opportunity that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) bring to optimization.

But we have to do that while paying attention to ethical AI principles as well, because these types of technologies can be misused if we’re not paying attention to the ethical implications. I feel that we have a strong need to not only use the ethical AI principles that are in place today but to continue to advance that thinking as well as more and more AI and ML solutions are brought to market.

Gardner: It’s been a fascinating discussion, but I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how companies along with their partners, suppliers, and employees can best manage and govern the resources and assets for sustainability. And we’ve learned how HPE has newly accelerated its many programs and initiatives to reduce its carbon emissions, conserve energy, and reduce waste far earlier than its earlier net-zero days. So please join me now in thanking our guests. We’ve been here with John Frey, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Thanks so much, John.

Frey: My pleasure. It was a delight to be with you today.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on the impact of information technology on the environment and society. I’m Dana Gardner, principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-supported discussions. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your 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 how Hewlett Packard Enterprise has newly accelerated its many programs and initiatives to reduce its carbon emissions, conserve energy, and reduce waste. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2022. All rights reserved.

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How Modern Storage Provides Hints On Optimizing and Best Managing Hybrid IT and Multi-Cloud Resources

Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. 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. Join us as we learn from leading IT industry analysts how to make the best of a hybrid IT journey to successful digital business transformation.

Our next interview examines the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. Managing hybrid IT necessitates not only a choice between public cloud and private cloud, but a more granular approach to picking and choosing which assets go where based on performance, costs, compliance, and business agility.

Peters

Here to report on how to begin to better assess what IT variables should be managed and thoughtfully applied to any cloud model is Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Welcome, Mark. 

Mark Peters: Thank you, Dana. Good to be with you. 

Gardner: Now that cloud adoption is gaining steam, it may be time to step back and assess what works and what doesn’t. In past IT adoption patterns, we’ve seen a rapid embrace that sometimes ends with at least a temporary hangover. Sometimes, it’s complexity or runaway or unmanaged costs, or even usage patterns that can’t be controlled. Mark, is it too soon to begin assessing best practices in identifying ways to hedge against any ill effects from runaway adoption of cloud? 

Peters: The short answer, Dana, is no. It’s not that the IT world is that different. It’s just that we have more and different tools. And that is really what hybrid comes down to -- available tools.

It’s not that those tools themselves demand a new way of doing things. They offer the opportunity to continue to think about what you want. But if I have one repeated statement as we go through this, it will be that it’s not about focusing on the tools, it’s about focusing on what you’re trying to get done. You just happen to have more and different tools now.
  
 Gardner: We hear sometimes that at as high as board of director levels, they are telling people to go cloud-first, or just dump IT all together. That strikes me as an overreaction. If we’re looking at tools and to what they do best, is cloud so good that we can actually just go cloud-first or cloud-only?

Cloudy cloud adoption

Peters: Assuming you’re speaking about management by objectives (MBO), doing cloud or cloud-only because that’s what someone with a C-level title saw on a Microsoft cloud ad on TV and decided that is right, well -- that clouds everything.

You do see increasingly different people outside of IT becoming involved in the decision. When I say outside of IT, I mean outside of the operational side of IT.

You get other functions involved in making demands. And because the cloud can be so easy to consume, you see people just running off and deploying some software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model because it looked easy to do, and they didn’t want to wait for the internal IT to make the change.

All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see.

Running away from internal IT and on-premises IT is not going to be a good idea for most organizations -- at least for a considerable chunk of their workloads. All of the research we do shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead as we can see. 

Gardner: I certainly agree with that. If it’s all then about a mix of things, how do I determine the correct mix? And if it’s a correct mix between just a public cloud and private cloud, how do I then properly adjust to considerations about applications as opposed to data, as opposed to bringing in microservices and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when they’re the best fit?

How do we begin to rationalize all of this better? Because I think we’ve gotten to the point where we need to gain some maturity in terms of the consumption of hybrid IT.

 

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Peters: I often talk about what I call the assumption gap. And the assumption gap is just that moment where we move from one side where it’s okay to have lots of questions about something, in this case, in IT. And then on the other side of this gap or chasm, to use a well-worn phrase, is where it’s not okay to ask anything because you’ll see you don’t know what you’re talking about. And that assumption gap seems to happen imperceptibly and very fast at some moment.

So, what is hybrid IT? I think we fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to believe that having some on-premises workloads and applications and some off-premises workloads and applications is hybrid IT. I do not think it is. It’s using a couple of tools for different things.

It’s like having a Prius and a big diesel and/or gas F-150 pickup truck in your garage and saying, “I have two hybrid vehicles.” No, you have one of each, or some of each. Just because someone has put an application or a backup off into the cloud, “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m hybrid.” No, you’re not really.

The cloud approach

The cloud is an approach. It’s not a thing per se. It’s another way. As I said earlier, it’s another tool that you have in the IT arsenal. So how do you start figuring what goes where?

I don’t think there are simple answers, because it would be just as sensible a question to say, “Well, what should go on flash or what should go on disk, or what should go on tape, or what should go on paper?” My point being, such decisions are situational to individual companies, to the stage of that company’s life, and to the budgets they have. And they’re not only situational -- they’re also dynamic.

I want to give a couple of examples because I think they will stick with people. Number one is you take something like email, a pretty popular application; everyone runs email. In some organizations, that is the crucial application. They cannot run without it. Probably, what you and I do would fall into that category. But there are other businesses where it’s far less important than the factory running or the delivery vans getting out on time. So, they could have different applications that are way more important than email.

When instant messaging (IM) first came out, Yahoo IM text came out, to be precise. They used to do the maintenance between 9 am and 5 pm because it was just a tool to chat to your friends with at night. And now you have businesses that rely on that. So, clearly, the ability to instant message and text between us is now crucial. The stock exchange in Chicago runs on it. IM is a very important tool.

The answer is not that you or I have the ability to tell any given company, “Well, x application should go onsite and Y application should go offsite or into a cloud,” because it will vary between businesses and vary across time.

If something is or becomes mission-critical or high-risk, it is more likely that you’ll want the feeling of security, I’m picking my words very carefully, of having it … onsite.

You have to figure out what you're trying to get done before you figure out what you're going to do with it.

But the extent to which full-production apps are being moved to the cloud is growing every day. That’s what our research shows us. The quick answer is you have to figure out what you’re trying to get done before you figure out what you’re going to do it with. 

Gardner: Before we go into learning more about how organizations can better know themselves and therefore understand the right mix, let’s learn more about you, Mark. 

Tell us about yourself, your organization at ESG. How long have you been an IT industry analyst? 

Peters: I grew up in my working life in the UK and then in Europe, working on the vendor side of IT. I grew up in storage, and I haven’t really escaped it. These days I run ESG’s infrastructure practice. The integration and the interoperability between the various elements of infrastructure have become more important than the individual components. I stayed on the vendor side for many years working in the UK, then in Europe, and now in Colorado. I joined ESG 10 years ago.

Lessons learned from storage

Gardner: It’s interesting that you mentioned storage, and the example of whether it should be flash or spinning media, or tape. It seems to me that maybe we can learn from what we’ve seen happen in a hybrid environment within storage and extrapolate to how that pertains to a larger IT hybrid undertaking.

Is there something about the way we’ve had to adjust to different types of storage -- and do that intelligently with the goals of performance, cost, and the business objectives in mind? I’ll give you a chance to perhaps go along with my analogy or shoot it down. Can we learn from what’s happened in storage and apply that to a larger hybrid IT model?

 

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Peters: The quick answer to your question is, absolutely, we can. Again, the cloud is a different approach. It is a very beguiling and useful business model, but it’s not a panacea. I really don’t believe it ever will become a panacea.

Now, that doesn’t mean to say it won’t grow. It is growing. It’s huge. It’s significant. You look at the recent announcements from the big cloud providers. They are at tens of billions of dollars in run rates.

But to your point, it should be viewed as part of a hierarchy, or a tiering, of IT. I don’t want to suggest that cloud sits at the bottom of some hierarchy or tiering. That’s not my intent. But it is another choice of another tool.

Let’s be very, very clear about this. There isn’t “a” cloud out there. People talk about the cloud as if it exists as one thing. It does not. Part of the reason hybrid IT is so challenging is you’re not just choosing between on-prem and the cloud, you’re choosing between on-prem and many clouds -- and you might want to have a multi-cloud approach as well. We see that increasingly.

What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes.

Those various clouds have various attributes; some are better than others in different things. It is exactly parallel to what you were talking about in terms of which server you use, what storage you use, what speed you use for your networking. It’s exactly parallel to the decisions you should make about which cloud and to what extent you deploy to which cloud. In other words, all the things you said at the beginning: cost, risk, requirements, and performance.

People get so distracted by bright, shiny objects. Like they are the answer to everything. What we should be looking for are not bright, shiny objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes. That’s all we should be looking for.

Focus on the outcome that you want, and then you figure out how to get it. You should not be sitting down IT managers and saying, “How do I get to 50 percent of my data in the cloud?” I don’t think that’s a sensible approach to business. 

Gardner: Lessons learned in how to best utilize a hybrid storage environment, rationalizing that, bringing in more intelligence, software-defined, making the network through hyper-convergence more of a consideration than an afterthought -- all these illustrate where we’re going on a larger scale, or at a higher abstraction.

Going back to the idea that each organization is particular -- their specific business goals, their specific legacy and history of IT use, their specific way of using applications and pursuing business processes and fulfilling their obligations. How do you know in your organization enough to then begin rationalizing the choices? How do you make business choices and IT choices in conjunction? Have we lost sufficient visibility, given that there are so many different tools for doing IT?

Get down to specifics

Peters: The answer is yes. If you can’t see it, you don’t know about it. So to some degree, we are assuming that we don’t know everything that’s going on. But I think anecdotally what you propose is absolutely true.

I’ve beaten home the point about starting with the outcomes, not the tools that you use to achieve those outcomes. But how do you know what you’ve even got -- because it’s become so easy to consume in different ways? A lot of people talk about shadow IT. You have this sprawl of a different way of doing things. And so, this leads to two requirements.

Number one is gaining visibility. It’s a challenge with shadow IT because you have to know what’s in the shadows. You can’t, by definition, see into that, so that’s a tough thing to do. Even once you find out what’s going on, the second step is how do you gain control? Control -- not for control’s sake -- only by knowing all the things you were trying to do and how you’re trying to do them across an organization. And only then can you hope to optimize them.

You can't manage what you can't measure. You also can't improve things that can't be managed or measured.

Again, it’s an old, old adage. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. You also can’t improve things that can’t be managed or measured. And so, number one, you have to find out what’s in the shadows, what it is you’re trying to do. And this is assuming that you know what you are aiming toward.

This is the next battleground for sophisticated IT use and for vendors. It’s not a battleground for the users. It’s a choice for users -- but a battleground for vendors. They must find a way to help their customers manage everything, to control everything, and then to optimize everything. Because just doing the first and finding out what you have -- and finding out that you’re in a mess -- doesn’t help you.

 

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Visibility is not the same as solving. The point is not just finding out what you have – but of actually being able to do something about it. The level of complexity, the range of applications that most people are running these days, the extremely high levels of expectations both in the speed and flexibility and performance, and so on, mean that you cannot, even with visibility, fix things by hand.

You and I grew up in the era where a lot of things were done on whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets. That doesn’t cut it anymore. We have to find a way to manage what is automated. Manual management just will not cut it -- even if you know everything that you’re doing wrong. 

Gardner: Yes, I agree 100 percent that the automation -- in order to deal with the scale of complexity, the requirements for speed, the fact that you’re going to be dealing with workloads and IT assets that are off of your premises -- means you’re going to be doing this programmatically. Therefore, you’re in a better position to use automation.

I’d like to go back again to storage. When I first took a briefing with Nimble Storage, which is now a part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), I was really impressed with the degree to which they used intelligence to solve the economic and performance problems of hybrid storage.

Given the fact that we can apply more intelligence nowadays -- that the cost of gathering and harnessing data, the speed at which it can be analyzed, the degree to which that analysis can be shared -- it’s all very fortuitous that just as we need greater visibility and that we have bigger problems to solve across hybrid IT, we also have some very powerful analysis tools.

Mark, is what worked for hybrid storage intelligence able to work for a hybrid IT intelligence? To what degree should we expect more and more, dare I say, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to be brought to bear on this hybrid IT management problem?

Intelligent automation a must

Peters: I think it is a very straightforward and good parallel. Storage has become increasingly sophisticated. I’ve been in and around the storage business now for more than three decades. The joke has always been, I remember when a megabyte was a lot, let alone a gigabyte, a terabyte, and an exabyte.

And I’d go for a whole day class, when I was on the sales side of the business, just to learn something like dual parsing or about cache. It was so exciting 30 years ago. And yet, these days, it’s a bit like cars. I mean, you and I used to use a choke, or we’d have to really go and check everything on the car before we went on 100-mile journey. Now, we press the button and it better work in any temperature and at any speed. Now, we just demand so much from cars.

To stretch that analogy, I’m mixing cars and storage -- and we’ll make it all come together with hybrid IT in that it’s better to do things in an automated fashion. There’s always one person in every crowd I talk to who still believes that a stick shift is more economic and faster than an automatic transmission. It might be true for one in 1,000 people, and they probably drive cars for a living. But for most people, 99 percent of the people, 99.9 percent of the time, an automatic transmission will both get you there faster and be more efficient in doing so. The same became true of storage.

We used to talk about how much storage someone could capacity-plan or manage. That’s just become old hat now because you don’t talk about it in those terms. Storage has moved to be -- how do we serve applications? How do we serve up the right place in the right time, get the data to the right person at the right time at the right price, and so on?

We don’t just choose what goes where or who gets what, we set the parameters -- and we then allow the machine to operate in an automated fashion. These days, increasingly, if you talk to 10 storage companies, 10 of them will talk to you about machine learning and AI because they know they’ve got to be in that in order to make that execution of change ever more efficient and ever faster. They’re just dealing with tremendous scale, and you could not do it even with simple automation that still involves humans.

It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. It will not be a “recommending tool,” it will be an “executing tool.”

We have used cars as a social analogy. We used storage as an IT analogy, and absolutely, that’s where hybrid IT is going. It will be self-managing and self-optimizing. Just to make it crystal clear, it will not be a “recommending tool,” it will be an “executing tool.” There is no time to wait for you and me to finish our coffee, think about it, and realize we have to do something, because then it’s too late. So, it’s not just about the knowledge and the visibility. It’s about the execution and the automated change. But, yes, I think your analogy is a very good one for how the IT world will change.
 

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Gardner: How you execute, optimize and exploit intelligence capabilities can be how you better compete, even if other things are equal. If everyone is using AWS, and everyone is using the same services for storage, servers, and development, then how do you differentiate?

How you optimize the way in which you gain the visibility, know your own business, and apply the lessons of optimization, will become a deciding factor in your success, no matter what business you’re in. The tools that you pick for such visibility, execution, optimization and intelligence will be the new real differentiators among major businesses.

So, Mark, where do we look to find those tools? Are they yet in development? Do we know the ones we should expect? How will organizations know where to look for the next differentiating tier of technology when it comes to optimizing hybrid IT?

What’s in the mix?

Peters: We’re talking years ahead for us to be in the nirvana that you’re discussing.

I just want to push back slightly on what you said. This would only apply if everyone were using exactly the same tools and services from AWS, to use your example. The expectation, assuming we have a hybrid world, is they will have kept some applications on-premises, or they might be using some specialist, regional or vertical industry cloud. So, I think that’s another way for differentiation. It’s how to get the balance. So, that’s one important thing.

And then, back to what you were talking about, where are those tools? How do you make the right move?

We have to get from here to there. It’s all very well talking about the future. It doesn’t sound great and perfect, but you have to get there. We do quite a lot of research in ESG. I will throw just a couple of numbers, which I think help to explain how you might do this.

We already find that the multi-cloud deployment or option is a significant element within a hybrid IT world. So, asking people about this in the last few months, we found that about 75 percent of the respondents already have more than one cloud provider, and about 40 percent have three or more.

You’re getting diversity -- whether by default or design. It really doesn’t matter at this point. We hope it’s by design. But nonetheless, you’re certainly getting people using different cloud providers to take advantage of the specific capabilities of each.

This is a real mix. You can’t just plunk down some new magic piece of software, and everything is okay, because it might not work with what you already have -- the legacy systems, and the applications you already have. One of the other questions we need to ask is how does improved management embrace legacy systems?

Some 75 percent of our respondents want hybrid management to be from the infrastructure up, which means that it’s got to be based on managing their existing infrastructure, and then extending that management up or out into the cloud. That’s opposed to starting with some cloud management approach and then extending it back down to their infrastructure.

People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It’s enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change.

People want to enhance what they currently have so that it can embrace the cloud. It's enhancing your choice of tiers so you can embrace change. Rather than just deploying something and hoping that all of your current infrastructure -- not just your physical infrastructure but your applications, too -- can use that, we see a lot of people going to a multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model. That entirely makes sense. You're not just going to pick one cloud model and hope that it  will come backward and make everything else work. You start with what you have and you gradually embrace these alternative tools. 

Gardner: We’re creating quite a list of requirements for what we’d like to see develop in terms of this management, optimization, and automation capability that’s maybe two or three years out. Vendors like Microsoft are just now coming out with the ability to manage between their own hybrid infrastructures, their own cloud offerings like Azure Stack and their public cloud Azure.

 

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Where will we look for that breed of fully inclusive, fully intelligent tools that will allow us to get to where we want to be in a couple of years? I’ve heard of one from HPE, it’s called Project New Hybrid IT Stack. I’m thinking that HPE can’t be the only company. We can’t be the only analysts that are seeing what to me is a market opportunity that you could drive a truck through. This should be a big problem to solve.

Who’s driving?

Peters: There are many organizations, frankly, for which this would not be a good commercial decision, because they don’t play in multiple IT areas or they are not systems providers. That’s why HPE is interested, capable, and focused on doing this. 

Many vendor organizations are either focused on the cloud side of the business -- and there are some very big names -- or on the on-premises side of the business. Embracing both is something that is not as difficult for them to do, but really not top of their want-to-do list before they’re absolutely forced to.

From that perspective, the ones that we see doing this fall into two categories. There are the trendy new startups, and there are some of those around. The problem is, it’s really tough imagining that particularly large enterprises are going to risk [standardizing on them]. They probably even will start to try and write it themselves, which is possible – unlikely, but possible.

Where I think we will get the list for the other side is some of the other big organizations --- Oracle and IBM spring to mind in terms of being able to embrace both on-premises and off-premises.  But, at the end of the day, the commonality among those that we’ve mentioned is that they are systems companies. At the end of the day, they win by delivering the best overall solution and package to their clients, not individual components within it.

If you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment took, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor.

And by individual components, I include cloud, on-premises, and applications. If you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT deployment tool, you probably have to look at a hybrid IT vendor. That last part I think is self-descriptive. 

Gardner: Clearly, not a big group. We’re not going to be seeking suppliers for hybrid IT management from request for proposals (RFPs) from 50 or 60 different companies to find some solutions. 

Peters: Well, you won’t need to. Looking not that many years ahead, there will not be that many choices when it comes to full IT provisioning. 

Gardner: Mark, any thoughts about what IT organizations should be thinking about in terms of how to become proactive rather than reactive to the hybrid IT environment and the complexity, and to me the obvious need for better management going forward?

Management ends, not means

Peters: Gaining visibility into not just hybrid IT but the on-premise and the off-premise and how you manage these things. Those are all parts of the solution, or the answer. The real thing, and it’s absolutely crucial, is that you don’t start with those bright shiny objects. You don’t start with, “How can I deploy more cloud? How can I do hybrid IT?” Those are not good questions to ask. Good questions to ask are, “What do I need to do as an organization? How do I make my business more successful? How does anything in IT become a part of answering those questions?”

In other words, drum roll, it’s the thinking about ends, not means. 

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave there. We’ve been exploring growing need for proper rationalization of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. And we’ve learned how managing hybrid IT necessitates making better choices between cloud -- but also thinking about the ends rather than the means as we get to more granular tools and have even more options for how to accomplish things.

So, please join me in thanking our guest, Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Thanks so much, Mark. 

Peters: My pleasure. Thank you. 

Gardner:  If our listeners and readers want to follow you and gain more of your excellent insight, how should they do that? 

Peters: The best way is to go to our website, www.esg-global.com. You can find not just me and all my contact details and materials but those of all my colleagues and the many areas we cover and study in this wonderful world of IT. 

Gardner: Also thank you to our audience for joining us for this Briefings Direct Voice of the Analyst discussion on how to better manage the hybrid IT journey to digital business transformation.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principle Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Follow me on Twitter @Dana_Gardner and find more hybrid IT-focused podcasts at www.briefingsdirect.com. Please pass this content on to your IT community, if you found it valuable, and please come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

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