EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

As promised in my previous post on “Software Defined Storage – Why Customers Should Care”, I want to follow-up with a brief overview of the competitive landscape.

Evan Quinn and I have been collecting popular customer questions for a while and wanted to share our thoughts on these questions in the form of a new format: EMA CLOUD RANTS. Each week we will discuss one of the hot topics in enterprise IT to provide the viewer with rapid analyst insights, without any fluff. Here goes the first one:

Of course, I always encourage practitioners to carefully study the full EMA research report on the “Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center” or at least read the research study summary or at the very least join the EMA SDDC Research webinar on February 18, but I still want to briefly summarize the key findings here.

What does Big Data mean to traditional enterprise IT? Organizations of any size and industry are becoming more and more aware of the incredible importance of capturing, managing and analyzing the data available to them. The more comprehensively companies are able to tap structured and unstructured data sources, the quicker they can refresh this data and the more successfully they make this body of data available to all business units, the better they can develop advantages in the market place. Today’s business units are demanding the rapid implementation of these big data use cases, as well as optimal resiliency, cost efficiency, security and performance.

Much marketing hype and heated discussions should be seen as excellent indicators for the fact that Software Defined Storage (SDS) is one of the hottest topics in today’s data center. Naturally, every vendor defines SDS based on their own product range, sometimes leaving customer out of the equation.

As every year, IBM invited the analyst community to Stamford, CT, for a deep dialogue on today’s most important topics in enterprise IT. Here is a short overview for everyone interested in IBM’s current world view.

The Havana release of OpenStack was launched on October 17, about three weeks prior to the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong.  As always, there are many new features -high availability, load balancing, easier upgrades, plugins for development tools, improved SDN support, fiber channel SAN support, improved bare metal capabilities- and even two new core components, Ceilometer -metering and monitoring- and Heat -orchestration of the creation of entire application environments- to admire. Without any doubt, OpenStack is becoming more enterprise ready with each new release .

When it comes to cloud technologies, discussions often get passionate or even heated. It’s all about the “war of the stacks”, where much Cool Aid is dispensed to get customers to buy into the respective cult. This discussion reminds me of the old days of enterprise IT, where everything was about technology instead of business value. You either bought one thing or the other and then you were locked in for a half decade. Dark times.

Optimizing the end-user experience has many dimensions to it, and one key element of them is ensuring that any issues from password reset, to application access, to support for multiple endpoints by a single user—are all addressed without your users feeling that they’re queuing up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. This blog leverages EMA research to examine how a truly efficient service desk can make itself all the more effective by becoming more transparent, less verbally visible, and yet ultimately far more end-user empowering.

In an ideal world, customers would be able to fully take advantage of the benefits of hybrid cloud by rationally matching infrastructure parameters -cost, performance, reliability, availability, security, regulatory compliance, scalability- with the requirements and dependencies of each application.