EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Digital attackers in 2018 need to focus on one key challenge: “how do I deliver the best possible value to my clients, without significantly increasing cost.“

For readers who would like to see what happened to our 2017 predictions, please take a look. Jens Soeldner and the EMA Team sat down again this month to look into the crystal ball for 2018.

Breaking the Triangle of Cost, Quality, and Speed

This year’s AWS Reinvent delivered major announcements in DevOps, machine learning and IoT. All of the announced capability aim to eliminate infrastructure as the bottleneck for enterprises to become ‘digital attackers’. Observing the nearly 50.000 developers, architects, and software operators that came to Reinvent showed us a significant degree of genuine excitement about Amazon helping enterprises release new software faster, at a higher quality and lower cost.

“vRealize Automation really doesn’t have an API,” says a reputable partner of a VM-ware centric consulting firm, “they say that it does, but it still does not, so I won’t tell my customers that it does.” Then he goes on in a slightly agitated manner “,also, there is no easy-to-implement orchestrator and no central queueing system to tie together all the VMware components based on dynamically changing policy-defined app requirements.” “Then finally,” he continues, “I have yet another client who asked me to come back with ‘an alternative to vRA, as my developers just don’t want vRA."

(You can read more about the content of the EMA Top 3 - Enterprise Decision Guide in my first Post)

(Click here to jump to the next part and read about how EMA selected its Top 3 products)

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.

"Today, a dev team leveraging Kubernetes containers can get a cloud app up in minutes." This statement by Arvind Krishna, IBM’s GM for Hybrid Cloud, at the beginning of his InterConnect 2017 keynote should have received a lot more recognition than it did. This one sentence shows the fundamental shift in IBM’s strategy, away from the old Tivoli-centric IT ops company and toward a modern DevOps-focused organization that is looking for differentiation up the stack. Today’s IBM encourages developers to deploy entire application environments without IT administrators even being aware.