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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.
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| Gardner |
This composable
cloud strategies interview explores how changes in business
organization and culture demand a new approach to leadership over such
functions as hybrid and multi-cloud
procurement and optimization.
We’ll now hear from an IT
industry analyst about the forces reshaping the consumption of hybrid cloud
services and why the model around procurement must be accompanied by an updated
organizational approach -- perhaps even a new office or category of officer in
the business category.
Here to help us explore who --
or what -- should be in charge of spurring effective change in how companies
acquire, use, and refine their new breeds of IT is John Abbott, Vice
President of Infrastructure and Co-Founder of The 451 Group. Welcome,
John.
John Abbott: Thank
you very much for inviting me.
Gardner: What
has changed about the way that IT is being consumed in companies? Is there some
gulf between how IT was acquired and the way it is being acquired now?
Cloud control controls costs
Abbott: I
think there is, and it’s because of the rate of technology change. The whole
cloud model is up over traditional IT and is being modeled in
a way that we probably didn’t foresee just 10 years ago. So, CAPEX to
OPEX, operational agility, complexity, and costs have all been big factors.
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| Abbott |
But now, it’s not just cloud, it's
multi-cloud as well. People are beginning to say, “We can’t rely on one cloud if
we are responsible citizens and want to keep our IT up and running.” There may
be other reasons for going to multi-cloud as well, such as cost and suitability
for particular applications. So that’s added further complexity to the cloud
model.
Also, on-premises deployments continue
to remain a critical function. You can’t just get rid of your existing
infrastructure investments that you have made over many, many years. So, all of
that has upended everything. The cloud model is basically simple, but it's getting
more complex to implement as we speak.
Gardner: Not surprisingly,
costs have run away from organizations that haven’t been able to be on top of a
complex mixture of IT infrastructure-as-a-service
(IaaS), platform-as-a-service
(PaaS), and software-as-a-service
(SaaS). So, this is becoming an economic imperative. It seems to me
that if you don't control this, your runaway costs will start to control you.
Abbott: Yes. You
need to look at the cloud models of consumption, because that really is the way
of the future. Cloud models can significantly reduce cost, but
only if you control it. Instant sizes, time slices, time increments,
and things like that all have a huge effect on the total cost of cloud services.
Gardner: When
we are thinking about who -- or what -- has the chops to know enough about the technology,
understand the economic implications, be in a position to forecast cost, budget
appropriately, and work with the powers that be who are in charge of enterprise
financial functions -- that's not your typical IT director or administrator.
IT Admin role evolves in cloud
Abbott: No. The
new generation of generalist IT administrators – the people who grew up with virtualization
-- don't necessarily look at the specifics of a storage platform, or compute platform,
or a networking service. They look at it on a much higher level,
and those virtualization admins are the ones I see as probably being the key to
all of this.
But they need tools that can help
them gain command of this. They need, effectively, a single pane of glass -- or
at least a
single control point -- for these multiple services, both on-premises
and in the cloud.
Also, as the data centers become
more distributed, going toward the edge, that adds even further complexity. The
admins will need new tools to do all of that, even if they don't need to know
the specifics of every platform.
Gardner: I
have been interested and intrigued by what Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
has been doing with such products as HPE
OneSphere, which, to your point, provides more tools, visibility,
automation, and composability
around infrastructure, cloud, and multi-cloud.
But then, I wonder, who
actually will best exploit these tools? Who is the target consumer, either as
an individual or a group, in a large enterprise? Or is this person or group yet
to be determined?
Abbott: I
think they are evolving. There are skill
shortages, obviously, for managing specialist equipment, and organizations
can’t replace some of those older admin types. So, they are building up a new
level of expertise that is more generalist. It’s those newer people coming up, who
are used to the mobile world, who are used to consumer products a bit more,
that we will see taking over.
We are going toward everything-as-a-service
and cloud consumption models. People have greater expectations on what they can
get out of a system as well.
Also, you want the right
resources to be applied to your application. The best, most cost-effective
resources; it might be in the cloud, it might be a particular cloud service
from AWS
or from Microsoft
Azure or from Google Cloud Platform, or it might
be a specific in-house platform that you have. No one is likely to have of all that
specific knowledge in the future, so it needs to be automated.
We are going toward everything-as-a-service and cloud consumption models. People have greater expectations on what they can get out of a system as well.
Gardner: Are
we getting to a point where we will look for an
outsourced approach to overall cloud operations, the new IT
procurement function? Would a systems integrator, or even a vendor in a neutral
position, be able to assert themselves on best making these decisions? What do
you think comes next when it comes to companies that can't quite pull this off by
themselves?
People and AI partnership prowess
Abbott: The role
of partners is very important. A lot of the vertically oriented systems
integrators and value-added resellers, as we used to call them, with specific application
expertise are probably the people in the best position.
We saw recently at HPE Discover
the announced acquisition of BlueData,
which allows you to configure in your infrastructure a particular pool for things
like big data and analytics applications. And that’s sort of application-led.
The experts in data analysis and
in artificial
intelligence (AI), the data scientists coming up, are the people
that will drive this. And they need partners with expertise in vertical sectors
to help them pull it together.
Gardner: In
the past when there has been a skills vacuum, not only have we seen a systems
integration or a professional services role step up, we have also seen
technology try to rise to the occasion and solve complexity.
Where do you think the concept
of AIOps,
or using AI and machine learning (ML)
to help better identify IT inefficiencies, will fit in? Will it help make
predictions or recommendations as to how you run your IT?
Abbott: There
is a huge potential there. I don’t think we have actually seen that really play
out yet. But IT tools are in a great position to gather a huge amount of data
from sensors and from usage data, logs, and everything like that and pull that
together, see what the patterns are, and recommend and optimize for that in the
future.
I have seen some startups
doing system tuning, for example. Experts who optimize the performance of a server
usually have a particular area of expertise, and they can't really go beyond
that because it's huge in itself. There are around 100 “knobs” on a server that
you can tweak to up the speed. I think you can only do that in an automated
fashion now. And we have seen some startups use AI modeling, for instance, to
pull those things together. That will certainly be very important in the
future.
Gardner: It
seems to me a case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes. The IT department
doesn’t seem to be on the forefront of using big data to solve their problems.
Abbott: I
know. It's really surprising because they are the people best able to do that.
But we are seeing some AI coming together. Again, at the recent HPE Discover conference,
HPE InfoSight
made news as a tool that’s starting to do that analysis more. It came from the Nimble
acquisition
and began as a storage-specific product. Now it’s broadening out, and it seems
they are going to be using it quite a lot in the future.
Gardner: Perhaps
we have been looking for a new officer or office of leadership to solve
multi-cloud IT complexity, but maybe it's going to be a case of the machines
running the machines.
Faith in future automation
Abbott: A lot
of automation will be happening in the future, but that takes trust. We have
seen AI waves [of interest] over the years, of course, but the new wave of AI
still has a trust issue. It takes a bit of faith for users to hand over control.
But as we have talked about,
with multi-cloud, the edge,
and things like microservices and containers -- where you split up applications
into smaller parts -- all of that adds to the complexity and requires
a higher level of automation that we haven’t really quite got to yet
but are going toward.
Gardner: What
recommendations can we conjure for enterprises today to start them on the right
path? I’m thinking about the economics of IT consumption, perhaps getting more
of a level playing field or a common denominator in terms of how one acquires
an operating basis using different finance models. We have heard about the use
of these plans by HPE, HPE GreenLake
Flex Capacity, for example.
I wrote a research paper on essentials of edge-to-cloud and hybrid management. We recommend a proactive cloud strategy. Think out where to put your workloads and how to distribute them across different clouds.
Abbott: I
actually recently wrote a research paper for HPE on the eight
essentials of edge-to-cloud and hybrid IT management. The first
thing we recommended was a proactive cloud strategy. Think out your cloud
strategy, of where to put your workloads and how to distribute them around to different
clouds, if that’s what you think is necessary.
Then modernize your existing
technology. Try and use automation tools on that traditional stuff and simplify
it with hyperconverged
and/or composable
infrastructure so that you have more flexibility about your resources.
Make the internal stuff more
like a cloud. Take out some of that complexity. It's has to be quick to
implement. You can’t spend six months doing this, or something like that.
Some of these tools we are
seeing, like HPE OneView and HPE OneSphere, for example, are a better bet than
some of the traditional huge management frameworks that we used to struggle
with.
Make sure it's future-proof.
You have to be able to use operating system and virtualization advances [like
containers] that we are used to now, as well as public cloud and open APIs.
This helps accelerate things that are coming into the systems infrastructure
space.
Then strive for everything-as-a-service,
so use cloud
consumption models. You want analytics, as we said earlier, to help
understand what's going on and where you can best distribute workloads -- from
the cloud to the edge or on-premises, because it's a hybrid world and that’s what
we really need.
And then make sure you can
control your spending and utilization of those services, because otherwise they
will get out of control and you won't save any money at all. Lastly, be ready
to extend your control beyond the data center to the edge as things get more
distributed. A lot of the computing will increasingly happen close to the edge.
Computing close to the edge
Abbott: Yes. That's
has to be something you start working on now. If you have software-defined
infrastructure, that's going to be easier to distribute than if you are still
wedded to particular systems, as the old, traditional model was.
Gardner: We have
talked about what companies should do. What about what they shouldn't do? Do
you just turn off the spigot and say no more cloud services until you get
control?
It seems to me that that would
stifle innovation, and developers would be particularly angry or put off by
that. Is there a way of finding a balance between creative innovation that uses
cloud services, but within the confines of an economic and governance model
that provides oversight, cost controls, and security and risk controls?
Abbott: The
best way is to use some of these new tools as bridging tools. So, with hybrid
management tools, you can keep your existing mission-critical applications running
and make sure that they aren't disrupted. Then, gradually you can move over the
bits that make sense onto the newer models of cloud and distributed edge.
You don't do it in one big
bang. You don’t lift-and-shift from one to another, or react, as some people
have, to reverse back from cloud if it has not worked out. It's about keeping
both worlds going in a controlled way. You must make sure you measure what you
are doing, and you know what the consequences are, so it doesn't get out of
control.
Gardner: I’m
afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how changes in
business organization and culture have demanded a new approach to oversight and
management of total IT assets, resources, and services. And we have learned
about how consumption of hybrid and multi-cloud services is a starting point
for regaining control over a highly heterogeneous IT landscape.
Please join me in thanking our
guest, John Abbott, Vice President of Infrastructure and Co-Founder of The 451
Group. Thanks so much, John.
Abbott: Thank
you very much, indeed. I enjoyed it.
Gardner: And a
big thank you to our audience as well 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 on 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 how
changes in business organization and culture demand a new approach to
leadership over such functions as hybrid and multi-cloud procurement and
optimization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights
reserved.
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