EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

I recently presented findings from my Workload Automation (WLA) research and other EMA research on a webinar with Tim Eusterman, Sr. Director Solutions Marketing at BMC in a webinar titled “How Digital Business is Shaping the Next Wave of Automation”. The recording of the webinar is now live here, and the slides are available here.

“It feels like magic but it is technology,” and “we will help transform every company into a software company,” were the two quotes by Michael Dell that best summed up the spirit of  Dell EMC World 2017. These statements show the genuine excitement of a seasoned tech executive to attack the next challenge of his career: merging the Dell EMC brands -Pivotal, VMware, RSA, SecureWorks, and Virtustream- into one highly differentiated IT powerhouse.

IT analytics vendor ExtraHop unveiled a cloud-based service that applies machine learning heuristics to the metadata that its appliances generate from packet stream analysis. The service should give users better visibility into IT service problems and security threats.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) recently unveiled plans to redefine itself for the post-hype phase of software-defined networking (SDN). I welcome the ONF’s reset and believe it bodes well for the industry’s future.

Editor’s Note: This blog post is sponsored by Citrix. The ideas and analysis are entirely the authors own.

EMA's latest research shows that 68% of enterprises are in the process of evaluating container technologies. Why is everyone today so fascinated by containers? It reminds me of the OpenStack-mania in 2013. At the time I was convinced that VMware had set out to crush the hype, while IBM, Rackspace and a ton of VC funded startups oversold OpenStack to the highest degree. I still have my collection of USB sticks with OpenStack distributions from Piston, Mirantis and friends. Claiming that all I had to do was plugging these sticks into any piece of metal and I'd have Amazon EC2 running right under my desk was not a great idea and ultimately lead to a degree of frustration that made the Microsoft and VMware tax look attractive and ultimately turned Amazon Web Services into a $4.5 billion business.

Traditional IT infrastructure monitoring focuses on hypervisor hosts, storage and VMs. Application impact is tracked through vSphere resource tagging. This simple and mostly static drilldown approach to full-stack monitoring no longer works for modern microservices based computing.

Wavefront could be seen as the Swiss Army knife of IT Ops Analytics tools, which makes this VMware acquisition so interesting. Infusing vRealize, Cloud Foundation and even vSphere, vSAN and NSX with Wavefront analytics would enable VMware to run, not walk, toward the Business-defined Data Center (BdDC).

The growing market for analytics in IT is one of the more exciting areas to watch in the technology industry. Exciting because of the variety and types of vendor innovation in this area. And exciting as well because our research indicates the adoption of advanced IT analytics supports data sharing and joint decision making in a way that’s catalytic for both IT and digital transformation.