The digital realm in healthcare is in a constant state of flux, and for IT professionals, staying updated is more than just a necessity; it’s a mandate. We don’t merely acknowledge these IT challenges; we’re deeply attuned to them, striving to devise the most efficient strategies and tech solutions to cut costs, increase margins, and build resilience.  

Forrester emphasizes that investments in customer experiences can significantly boost revenue. However, faced with industry challenges, healthcare leadership teams are now refining their strategies, ensuring that investments not only drive tangible results but also seamlessly integrate with the evolving IT landscape. 

Navigating the complex realm of healthcare IT, challenges linked to data management and system integration often emerge, influencing both IT teams and the overarching goals of healthcare entities. 

Opportunity: The Struggle of Siloed Systems 

The existence of isolated systems and data can significantly restrict IT teams’ ability to extract real business value. With multiple departments operating on different platforms, achieving a holistic view of operations becomes a dream far from reality. 

Quick Tip: Position your IT organization as a North Star resource for business success by fostering alignment and partnership between IT and business stakeholders.  

Opportunity: Drowning in Data 

The sheer volume of data is a common pain point. The challenge isn’t just about accumulating data—it’s about harnessing its true potential. And, without the right tools and strategies, even the most data-rich organizations can feel data-poor. 

Quick Tip: Unlock your data’s full potential with a pragmatic, decisive plan. Determine your current stance, set clear goals, and chart the journey with an enterprise data roadmap that considers people, processes, and technology. 

Opportunity: Cost of Employee Attrition 

Losing key IT personnel isn’t just about the loss of a workforce—it’s about the loss of institutional knowledge. High turnover rates can set teams back, making it challenging to maintain momentum and growth. 

Quick Tip: Foster an integrated and agile team environment. This promotes constant collaboration, where members share knowledge and best practices daily. Embracing managed services support not only fills immediate expertise gaps but also ensures continuity. 

Opportunity: Trimming Operational Overhead 

In an era where every penny counts, finding ways to streamline operations and reduce costs is essential. IT teams are under pressure to ensure efficiency without compromising system integrity or security. 

Quick Tip: Embrace intelligent automation. By automating repetitive tasks and optimizing workflows, healthcare IT teams can drastically reduce operational overhead while enhancing system reliability and security. Automation isn’t just a cost-cutter; it’s a strategic enabler. 

Navigate the Tech Labyrinth With Confidence 

The overarching goal? Optimize investments while breaking down siloed data and time-consuming processes. To help achieve this, our guide provides insights tailored to the specific challenges of IT teams in the healthcare sector. 

Unlock the full potential of your IT investments. With our comprehensive guide you’ll begin to delve deeper into understanding and overcoming these challenges. Equip yourself with insights that ensure your investments effectively lower costs and boost margins. 

It’s time to transform challenges into opportunities. Download our guide today. 

Delivering seamless, consistent, and engaging experiences starts with a customer-centered digital strategy. This ongoing series explores the characteristics that make up a great digital strategy and how to deliver powerful brand moments that solidify customer loyalty and drive differentiation for your organization.

Throughout this series, we’ve focused on several principles, strategies, and technological elements we consider essential components of an effective, well-rounded digital strategy. Now I’d like to round out our first 15 Digital Essentials with a concept that should provide the foundation for digital and customer experience initiatives: the cloud.

The Great Enabler

Cloud computing is not a new concept, but its meaning has evolved as cloud’s capabilities and usage have expanded. The cloud is no longer simply a place, but a collection of connected platforms with uses ranging from improving a single process to enabling a larger digital transformation.
Cloud provides a foundation where companies can reimagine their businesses for the digital age. It is at the core of many digital transformation initiatives because it includes the capabilities organizations of every size want to achieve – scalability and elasticity, cost efficiency, and room for innovation.
Cloud has increased the pace of innovation by changing the way we design, build, and run the applications that power internal processes and external customer experiences. Additionally, it levels the playing field between the long-established enterprises and nimble new startups, which are now often competing for the same customers’ attention.
Here are some of the ways the cloud makes this possible:

Pay for what you need, when you need it

Elasticity in computing refers to the ability of a platform or resource to automatically scale up to meet increased demand and scale down when the demand subsides. This ability to scale up and down is one of the main tenets and benefits of modern cloud technology. As a result, your organization only pays your cloud service provider for the storage and computing power you consume and no more.
Historically, a company would have to purchase and implement the storage and computing resources needed to handle its highest usage demands and pay to maintain that setup year round. In the retail space, for example, you had to build an infrastructure robust enough to meet the demands of Black Friday, even though you only needed that bandwidth for a small percentage of the time. Similar examples include health insurance providers with open enrollment periods, tax preparation companies during tax season, or any other company that experiences ebbs and flows in site traffic or business events (hint: pretty much everyone).
The pay-per-use model built into cloud computing provides an avenue for accessible development and growth for organizations of almost any size. Forrester states that scalable and elastic cloud solutions will be a priority in the enterprise software “buyer’s market” predicted to take place over the next decade.
While the expense of purchasing and maintaining physical hardware would be cost prohibitive for many small companies or those just getting started, cloud provides a way to pay for exactly what you need in the moment, while also giving you room to grow without needing a system overhaul. Small startups can effectively compete with larger organizations because they are able to increase their technology costs at the same rate as their need and revenue.

Centralized data, powering personalization

Successful marketing is built upon a good base of information. Providing a sound data structure is necessary for executing a valuable customer experience.
Many companies attempting to provide personalized, omnichannel customer experiences are running into the problem of siloed data dispersed in multiple legacy systems across their organizations. This poses a challenge for building a complete picture of your customer, let alone delivering relevant content at the right time. It can also be expensive, since you may be maintaining multiple, redundant systems.
Centralizing your data in the cloud, where all relevant teams and systems can access and contribute to it, can provide the unified view of the customer you need to achieve smart personalization across each channel. The extensive storage capacity and computing power available in the cloud also opens the door for predictive analytics and other big data projects, making them affordable for organizations that may not have otherwise had those capabilities.

Far-reaching CX benefits

Cloud technology’s ability to automatically scale up and down directly impacts the experience your customers have on your website. Instead of running into slow page speeds on high-traffic days, customers will enjoy the same smooth experience any time. Cloud provides an additional customer experience benefit for multinational and global organizations: reach.
There are limitations to how fast data can travel across geographic distances, so the closer you can physically place your services to your end user, the better their experience will be. Many of the major cloud providers have data centers all over the world. If your business wants to deliver content or a mobile or web app to audiences in North America and Asia, for example, you could store instances of those services on servers located in those regions. This ability lets you provide the same speed and quality experience to all your customers without the cost of building and maintaining separate local infrastructures.

Innovation without delay

Time spent updating existing applications and releasing new capabilities is a common point of frustration for organizations using dated, legacy systems. Delays in improving your customer-facing and internal systems can significantly impact your overall customer experience and your bottom line. When your systems are based in the cloud, the turnaround time for new releases and updates can go from months and years to a matter of weeks and months.
Organizations that began in the cloud or have undergone significant app modernization are equipped to release new updates daily. Ebay, for example, has hundreds of production deployments per day. Every time the smallest change is made, it can be run, tested, and deployed to the production environment immediately, providing a constant flow of new functionality and capabilities for the best possible user experience.

Not just for natives

The Ubers, Lyfts, and Airbnbs of the world would likely not have succeeded without the cloud. In addition to the cloud’s elasticity, reach, and cost effectiveness, another advantage enjoyed by these cloud natives is that they didn’t have to deal with the baggage of legacy systems and infrastructure. They are much more lightweight and nimble – ready to innovate and disrupt industries with older, more established organizations.
We believe this agility has contributed to the big push toward app modernization we’re seeing across industries. Organizations of all sizes are evaluating their legacy systems and the ways they build, run, and maintain them. Many have found that they need to reinvent those structures and processes to remain competitive, and have begun their journeys to the cloud by migrating their front-end, customer-facing technology first. The next wave of innovation will likely involve transforming the heavy-duty core business applications these enterprises run on, which are a bit more difficult to maneuver.
Finding ways to leverage the scalability and reach of cloud for these bulky core systems provides the same benefits to large enterprises that the small, native startups have been able to capitalize on from Day One. Instead of asking whether you can afford to start modernizing and moving toward the cloud, the real question is whether you can afford not to take advantage of the speed, scalability, and cost savings it provides – especially when your competitors are reaping those benefits.
As Elias Khnaser, a VP Analyst at Gartner, puts it, “If you have not developed a cloud-first strategy yet, you are likely falling behind your competitors.”

The means, not the end

While cloud is an enabler of change, it is not (and should not be) the principle goal of change. No organization should set its sights on the cloud because it’s the cool place to be in the digital age. Any move toward cloud capabilities should support and accelerate a journey. It’s important to not conflate the vehicle used to power that journey with the actual destination which is a potential misstep for many business leaders, especially those in technical roles.
Cloud is no longer a competitive differentiator. According to Gartner, 40% of organizations in North America alone plan to spend the majority of new or additional funding on cloud.
Considering how many organizations now use the cloud, the question is no longer “Should you be leveraging the cloud?” but “How should you take advantage of it and to what extent?” Most of our cloud-related discussions with clients and prospects don’t involve selling them on the concept of cloud or the new models of application development and modernization. The types of questions we frequently hear are along the lines of “How can we best provide value to our particular customers and organization with the cloud?”

Not just an IT play

One of the most common misconceptions about cloud is that it belongs solely in the realm of IT; other departments and leaders don’t need to worry about it. That is just not the case.
Cloud can fuel success in many different areas and processes in your organization, depending on your priorities and areas of focus. If you have a strong pipeline of acquisitions and mergers, for example, basing many of your core business applications in the cloud can help streamline integration and onboarding processes. Capabilities enabled by cloud can provide the best kind of internal disruption throughout an organization. It can create new revenue streams and improve the profitability of existing revenue streams while also enhancing the quality and resiliency of the organization’s services.
This means that everyone should take an interest in cloud. If leaders across departments can understand the business possibilities of cloud and its role in the organization’s overall success, they can be empowered to promote innovation and more rapidly achieve their goals.
Another important thing to keep in mind is adapting your organizational processes. Deploying a new model for designing, building, and running applications is not enough if your processes don’t also change. An effective move to the cloud will require a strategy on where to start, a plan for governance, security, and compliance, and a change management initiative to help bring your organization into alignment.

Getting started or making your next move

To make a modernized, cloud-based environment a reality, start by recognizing what you’re trying to accomplish. What is important to your organization specifically? Before diving in, you should explore and answer these questions. Collaborate with leaders across your organization as you define your goals and implementation strategy.
Laying this groundwork will help your teams operate smoothly and avoid confusion. We recommend starting starting small and getting a quick win on the books to help build momentum. However you decide to begin or continue your journey to the cloud, have a plan and make sure it is both realistic and aligned to your goals.
When used effectively, cloud technology has the potential to transform an entire organization, enhancing internal efficiency, financial outcomes, and your customers’ experience.

Creating stand-out digital customer experiences that attract, engage, and retain customers is a tall order. Perhaps you’ve already done some of the foundational work, and you need help with the next step.
When working with clients, we help make sure you know your customers and understand their journeys. Through design-thinking tools, industry research, and pragmatic ideation to execute from end-to-end, you will have what it takes to deliver experiences that surprise and delight your customers.
Ready to get started with your digital strategy? Dive in for more resources.

The following is the fourth blog in a series about why businesses are moving to the cloud to modernize and improve business performance.

So far in this series, we have examined the state of cloud and how cloud enables innovation, including a case study. In this blog, we’ll look at the benefits of cloud that power the ability to innovate – speed and agility.

Velocity of businesses

Business does not move at uniform speed. It varies from industry to industry, business to business, department to department, and even day to day. But many legacy systems are tightly integrated, which makes it difficult to significantly change a single system without impacting many others. This has limited the ability of some businesses to keep up with the demands of customers.

Cloud-based applications provide the ability to accommodate rapid change in response to customer demand. At the same time, cloud-based infrastructure provides unlimited scalability to support the most aggressive velocity of change without the long-term cost of unused private data center capacity. Thanks to its speed, cloud allows businesses to test the waters on development at a lower cost while not incurring any long-term cost if the test fails.

Agility and performance

The cloud doesn’t just bring speed – it also enables your business to be more agile and responsive to change.

Organizational agility

A digital transformation is about developing corporate agility across more than just technology. Cloud allows you to be more agile in the marketplace. For agility to improve, people need the tools to adapt to ever-changing customer demands. The ability to anticipate and take action immediately is an inherent benefit of adopting cloud technology.

Organizational performance

Performance can be measured by a variety of metrics, from corporate stock value to customer ratings. Cloud’s ability to provide real-time KPI assessment is an important tool to quickly respond to internal and external opportunities for performance improvement. Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings in the cloud arena provide fully automated tools to track corporate performance in all of your customer segments. This gives you the chance to build a portfolio of high-performing apps for both front-facing and back-end processes.

The cloud as a whole is highly scalable, which makes it agile and capable of delivering high levels of performance. This is useful both in terms of day-to-day events and large-scale, unexpected events.

Learn more

Click here or fill in the form below to read the guide Transform Your Business with Cloud and learn what cloud can do for you.

The following is the fourth blog in a series about software containers and Kubernetes, and their importance in modern application delivery.

In our last blog in this series, we examined the importance of utiziling a container management platform. In this blog, we’ll go further in depth on the multiple options you have when adopting a container management platform, and how to choose which is right for your business.

Open source container platforms

This is the do-it-yourself option for container platforms. Kubernetes is a rapidly moving open source project that can be downloaded, installed, and run on-premises or on cloud infrastructure. Leveraging the pure open source project comes with some obvious risks, including:

• Supporting and maintaining it
• Doing all the work to integrate it into the IT environment
• Configuring additional services like networking, storage, registries, logging, metrics, etc.

Accomplishing all of this requires significant investment and skills from internal resources, as well as an ongoing platform development team to stay on top of emerging features and ongoing security risks. Taking this path is betting that one’s organization can build and maintain a better container platform than the software vendors who are investing large sums of money to do the same.

Examples of open source container platforms include:

• Kubernetes
• Docker Swarm
• Mesos
• Rancher

Hosted offerings

Many different public cloud vendors provide a managed service on which to run containers. These services provide rapid cluster provisioning options and leave many of the cluster management and host operating system tasks to the cloud provider. They also provide additional services like enterprise-grade security, integrated CI/CD tooling, and are generally Kubernetes compliant, which means applications managed on their platforms could run anywhere Kubernetes runs.

Example options:

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• Amazon Kubernetes Service (EKS)
• Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
• IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services

Cloud providers are also starting to provide versions of these managed offerings that can run on any cloud or within an organization’s own data center. Examples include Anthos from Google Cloud and Kubernetes on Azure Stack. At the time of writing, these products are still early in their evolution, but are anticipated to be competitive solutions for customers looking for maximum flexibility on where to run their containers.

Enterprise container platforms

The last option is to adopt an enterprise container platform that provides pre-integrated components and value-add services to support the developer and operations teams leveraging the platform. These products can abstract away much of the grunt work around building containers, platform installation and setup, and configuring integrations, greatly simplifying operations overall. These options are able to run anywhere for the most part: on-premises, public cloud, or both.

Enterprise container platforms include integrated components required to build and run microservices that aren’t present in the open source Kubernetes project, like a container registry, security, logging, service mesh, and telemetry services. They may also include CI/CD and deployment tools to support container image pipelines. In addition, most provide a catalog of certified middleware, data, and other services.

Typical examples in this category of platforms include:

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
• Pivotal Platform/Kubernetes Services (PKS)
• IBM Cloud Private
• Docker Enterprise Edition

How to choose a container management platform

While open source community projects have driven much of the innovation around containers, many companies lack the skillsets required to implement containers by strictly leveraging an open source platform like Kubernetes. In addition, the complexity around managing the rapid stream of updates and security patches is significant and businesses still need to dedicate considerable resources to keep their systems updated and secure.

Companies often need help from partners and vendors to set up and operate the platforms that containers operate on. Products like Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal Platform provide all the key functionality, integration, and roadmaps needed for companies to implement a container platform. This allows customers to have a stable and secure operating environment while also being able to tap into the rapid pace of innovation.

The cost, management requirements, and needed skillsets are different for each of the options. The weight of these items can vary based upon the vendors, cloud provider, and more. Organizations that lack the experience and skillsets to manage a container environment may benefit from a vendor-supported option. Larger IT departments with a greater range of skills may be fine with a native open source option.

Coming to the correct decision requires a complete understanding of the key drivers around business needs, skillsets, expense drivers, regulatory requirements, and other key factors that may drive the company direction, as well as the options themselves.

Learn more

Either click here or fill out the form below to learn more about containers and prepare your business to develop an effective container strategy.

The following is the third blog in a series about software containers and Kubernetes, and their importance in modern application delivery.

So far in this series, we have explored why businesses are leveraging containers and the benefits that they bring. In this blog, we will examine container management platforms, what they are, and why they’re crucial for businesses that are leveraging containers.

Container management platforms vs. PaaS

Container management overlaps in some areas with platform as a service (PaaS) computing. While most have correctly viewed PaaS as a separate product segment, the differences between the two are quickly overlapping. PaaS models traditionally have developers in focus and try to establish a common way to package, deploy, and run applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Many PaaS products in the market are actually adopting Kubernetes as their core application platform and providing additional services such as monitoring, service mesh, registries, cluster provisioning, and automating security updates.

Why you should use container management platforms

Teams within an organization will often start experimenting with containers by pulling down container images and running them on their local machines. They may then move on to sharing containers they’ve developed with other team members through a container registry. As proficiency grows, they may even wire several containers together and deploy them as a single unit.

As organizations start leveraging containers beyond the development/test phases and start adopting them in production, it becomes quickly apparent that additional tools are required to manage the containers effectively. This is where container management tools come into play.

Container platforms are a category of software tools that provide additional capabilities to deal with the complexity of running containers at a large scale across many servers. As a category, they’ve seen rapid adoption as the container technology has been democratized as a result of Docker and alternative image building/runtime tools. Kubernetes has seen the broadest adoption among the various container management tools and will be the main focus of this section.

In addition to the management features, Kubernetes enables applications to migrate seamlessly across environments. It’s quickly becoming the standard platform for developing cloud-native apps, whether within existing data centers, on private cloud, or on public cloud. This fact alone, thanks to the portability that abstracts away differences in the underlying platform, is driving significant adoption of Kubernetes.

Learn more

Either click here or fill out the form below to learn more about containers and prepare your business to develop an effective container strategy.

The following is the first blog in a series about why businesses are moving to the cloud to modernize and improve business performance.

Gone are the days of wondering if your business needs to utilize the cloud. You must now decide how to best utilize it.

This is a byproduct of the evolution of the cloud and how it’s used. Cloud is no longer seen as a final destination for businesses – instead, it’s a collection of tools that can be utilized not just for the benefit of the business, but also for a larger digital transformation. Tools such as AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and DevOps work with cloud to improve business performance and enhance cloud’s benefits.

Many businesses recognize the potential of these capabilities and are acting on it:

• 77% of enterprises house at least one app or part of their infrastructure in the cloud
• 40% of organizations plan on spending the majority of new funding on cloud technology
• Increasing cloud usage is a top priority for business and tech leaders

These stats show a great shift from just a few years ago when many businesses were just dipping their toe into cloud technology.

The focus that enterprises are putting on the cloud is warranted. In this series, we will examine the benefits that the cloud will bring to:

• Day-to-day operations
• Revenue
• IT teams
• Your ability to stay ahead of the curve – and your competitor

Learn more

Click here or fill in the form below to read the guide Transform Your Business with Cloud and learn what cloud can do for you.

The following is the first blog in a series about software containers and Kubernetes, and their importance in modern application delivery.

Organizations across industries are examining their business for opportunities to digitally transform. Traditional methods of software delivery characterized by waterfall planning, arduous infrastructure provisioning, and manual changes are no longer able to deliver the innovation required to remain relevant. Along with culture and process changes, modern application platforms are imperative to realizing the IT agility organizations need to keep pace with business demands.

Software containers and container management platforms, specifically Kubernetes, have quickly become an industry standard for strategic modern application delivery. With companies deploying a wide range of infrastructure across multiple clouds and operating environments, it is essential that applications remain portable and able to be run efficiently in multiple places. More and more companies are turning to containers to make this possible.

Before we go any further, let’s discuss what containers are and their evolution over time.

What are software containers?

Containers are isolated runtime environments on a system that share resources such as CPU, memory, network, and disk with other containers on the same system. The key technical difference between containers and virtual machines is that containers do not virtualize any hardware; they share a common OS on each host. This allows container instances on the same server to consume available system resources as needed and on-demand while active, compared to virtual machines, which require downtime for scaling memory or CPU.

Container evolution

Containers are evolving. Ten years ago, LXC first combined two primitive features of Linux, namespaces and control groups (cgroups), and built a foundation for isolated runtime environments on a single operating system (OS). The first release of Docker was in March 2013, based on LXC. Docker changed the game with its consumption model for containers: developers could easily build them with Dockerfiles, easily share them with registries, and easily run them with a few simple commands. After six years, the number of organizations exploring or using containers today is a testament to how powerful this technology is.

Windows support for software containers and Kubernetes is now available and evolving. The Open Container Initiative has led to standardized interfaces and runtime specifications for container images. Multiple image building tools and container runtimes are available. There is a global movement behind containers and over 70% of organizations are reportedly using them in production, based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s recent survey.

Containers have revolutionized how organizations deploy and manage applications. They inherently bring benefits such as speed, portability, and resource efficiency into the software delivery process. But leveraging containers and related technologies appropriately across an enterprise can be challenging and requires an overarching strategy backed by careful planning and experimentation.

The guide takes a deeper look at containers, including:

• The business value of software containers
• Container management platforms
• Key considerations for leveraging software containers
• Simple steps for getting started

Either click here or fill out the form below to learn more about containers and prepare your business to develop an effective container strategy.

The monumental $34B IBM Red Hat acquisition officially closed earlier this month. In the wake of the acquisition, what does it mean for the technology market? 

Over my career, I’ve worked extensively with customers leveraging both IBM and Red Hat technologies. Here’s my take on the five key impacts that this acquisition will have on the market.

1. Open source consolidation

A major impact of the acquisition will be the consolidation of the open source market. The positive impact of this is that IBM will leverage its massive sales engine to push adoption of open source technology and standards, further cementing Kubernetes and other projects as the common foundation for cloud. 

The concerning part of this consolidation will be the elimination of competition it creates. Healthy competition generates innovation and ultimately, benefits to customers. Without IBM and Red Hat competing for cloud market share, other players will need to step in to generate that momentum. 

On the flip side, there is a history of good market consolidation in examples like Microsoft and GitHub. They have made a tremendous culture shift and numerous healthy contributions to the open source ecosystem. A positive indication for this merger is Red Hat and IBM’s position in the open source community. Red Hat is the obvious front leader, but IBM also has a history of investment in open source in areas like Apache, Linux, Eclipse, Hyperledger, and Istio. In this acquisition, IBM will become one of the largest open source contributors in the world. 

Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, said of the acquisition:

“Joining forces with IBM gives Red Hat the opportunity to bring more open source innovation to an even broader range of organizations and will enable us to scale to meet the need for hybrid cloud solutions that deliver true choice and agility.”

A potential concern for the open source community is that Red Hat will no longer be able to contribute to open source projects regardless of the commercial benefit for Red Hat. However, IBM currently has no restrictions on contributing to competing projects, and if anything, this acquisition shows that they are doubling down on their open source bet.

2. Kubernetes ubiquity

Another massive impact on the cloud market is the reinforcement of Kubernetes as the key enabler of hybrid cloud for enterprise. There’s been a rapid rise of the docker image format containers and Kubernetes, and even though these are still new technologies, they’ve become a standard for managing and running applications. Kubernetes is becoming a common foundation for public, private, and multi- cloud platforms. 

Do-it-yourself Kubernetes is not typically the recommended approach for most organizations, and enterprises tend to leverage established container platforms like OpenShift or in some cases CaaS on public cloud. OpenShift, however, is at the center of the reason IBM purchased Red Hat, positioning the duo as the dominate player in hybrid cloud. As a whole, the acquisition reinforces Kubrernetes’ importance and IBM’s investment in and focus on the platform to ensure its success. 

This acquisition will further solidify the platforms’ ubiquity and demonstrate that you can move forward on Kubernetes-based solutions with confidence.

3. Rising tides lift all boats

IBM has a tremendous install base across most industries worldwide. As they pull more organizations into open, container, and Kubernetes-based development models by moving their existing heritage and legacy systems onto hybrid cloud platforms, this enables expanded innovation in the market. It creates new use cases and patterns and grows the addressable cloud space for IBM Red Hat. But it also grows the space for other cloud vendors too. Other vendors and open source projects will spring up to support the ever-expanding array of use cases. Everyone will benefit as more applications are positioned for the cloud. 

4. Portfolio rationalization

While the acquisition adds new products to IBM’s portfolio, it also creates overlap. It will force a reconciliation between competitive IBM and Red Hat products. The most notable overlap is between OpenShift and IBM Cloud Private. That said, even before news of the acquisition broke, IBM had announced support for many of its data and middleware products on OpenShift. We’ll continue to see that progress as all IBM products transition to run on the container platform. 

While rationalization will inevitably occur, it’s important to move forward with confidence on your platform selection at this point, it’s going to be a period of time before we’ll see any rationalization play out and your competition isn’t waiting for you to make a decision. Move quickly and with confidence. 

5. Elephant dance party*

Red Hat has a strong potential to have a significant impact on IBM culture. 

People point to previous IBM acquisitions as an example of what will happen to Red Hat. But this is very different. At $34B, this is IBM’s largest acquisition by far, an order of magnitude bigger than any previous acquisition. The closest were Cognos at $5B and PWC at $3.5B. The IBM Red Hat deal is the third largest tech acquisition by any firm of all time. 

Not only does the immense size make this different, the leadership does as well. IBM is gaining an open leader in Jim Whitehurst. Ginny Rometty has acknowledged that IBM has a lot to learn from Red Hat and wants to preserve Red Hat’s culture to change IBM. IBM isn’t too big to change, and we should watch for the positive culture impact from Red Hat. Ginny said during Red Hat Summit in May, “I don’t have a death wish for $34 billion.”

* Reference to the 2002 book by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., CEO of IBM for almost 10 years, in which he recounts IBM’s historic turnaround from the brink of bankruptcy. 

My take: this acquisition has a lot of potential to positively impact the hybrid cloud market as a whole – and the time to act is now.  Establish your platform so that you can take advantage of the innovation as it comes and position your business for success leveraging the cloud.

As the IBM Red Hat acquisition comes closer to fruition, impacts to customers on both sides will soon be realized.  Now that the deal has been approved by the Department of Justice, the acquisition is on track to close later this year. What does this mean for those who currently use IBM and Red Hat products?  

Perficient has key partnerships with both IBM and Red Hat, with a significant number of our customers leveraging these technologies. About a quarter of our business is with IBM. Our CEO, Jeff Davis, said of the acquisition when it was announced, “For us, it’s two great partnerships joining forces. We are known and thought highly of by everybody on both sides,” he said. “Both sides have already reached out and expressed an interest in us being a key partner and helping bring them together out in the field. We’re excited about that.” This acquisition will affect us as a partner, but also our customers.  

From a partner perspective, here are a few of my observations on how I see the IBM Red Hat acquisition impacting the hybrid cloud market.  

Waiting for Change 

IBM has communicated that Red Hat will operate as a separate entity. With that, they have committed to maintaining the open source heritage, product portfolio, and go-to-market strategy for Red Hat.  

Even so, most customers are in a holding pattern until Q3 to see what happens. However, it’s unlikely much will happen even when the acquisition is final, especially with IBM’s commitment to treating Red Hat as a separate entity. We’ll have to wait 12 to 18 months beyond the deal close to see what if any changes will occur.  

Product Overlap  

While IBM and Red Hat certainly have complementary products, the acquisition will also create a lot of internal competition.  

This product merge will do two things:  

1. On the positive side, it opens a broader set of available products to best fit customer needs. Both sides are filling gaps, and the joint portfolio can be complementary. 
2. But it will also create redundancy that will need to be rationalized.  

Customers need to start planning how they will approach these redundancies. A partner with expertise in both IBM and Red Hat can help navigate that journey when it comes to product selection.  

For example, IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service will need to be rationalized with OpenShift at some point. While these products don’t directly compete, there is a significant overlap in functionality. Will IBM continue to maintain it? Likely for a while, but for how long? And when will they shift it all to OpenShift? In the early months of the merger, there may be value in IBM maintaining multiple services that serve the same purpose but undoubtedly in the near future there will be a rationalization to eliminate redundant capabilities. Customers should get ahead of these decisions and start planning now. 

Read more about the portfolio overlap created by the acquisition.  

OpenShift Focus 

When it comes down to it, IBM is buying Red Hat for OpenShift, so that will take center stage. We will see continued investment from both IBM and Red Hat in that platform, and OpenShift will become the common foundation for both IBM and Red Hat solutions. IBM has already started a transition toward containerizing their entire portfolio, and last year prior to the acquisition news, the two announced a partnership to certify IBM middleware cloud products on OpenShift. We will see that continue and expand.  

Traditional middleware and data products will leverage OpenShift as a common abstraction layer to run on and across any number of clouds. OpenShift – enabled by Kubernetes – provides a common foundation across all platforms in both portfolios. Docker-based container formats and Kubernetes, while still young, have quickly established themselves as an industry standard. Both IBM and Red Hat recognize that this will be the common foundation for most cloud-based solutions going forward.  

While OpenShift will take the spotlight, Ansible will be another important piece to drive DevOps and automation. We’ll see a growing reliance on it from IBM and more alignment with IBM products.   

Join Us in Minneapolis Next Week 

I’ll be speaking on this topic at an upcoming event in Minneapolis. If you’re in the area, please join Perficient and Red Hat for a discussion with Forrester analyst, Dave Bartoletti, on cloud and container strategy. E.G. Nadhan, Chief Technology Strategist at Red Hat, will also be moderating a discussion with customers, including TCF Bank and Sabre, on how this works in action.  

Event Details: 

• Thursday, June 13th | 2:30 – 5:30 PM 
• LaSalle Conference Center, Room PJ | 800 LaSalle Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55402 

• Agenda: 
  • 2:30 – 3:00: Check In 
  • 3:00– 4:30: Presentation and Interactive Discussion 
  • 4:30 – 5:30: Happy Hour and Networking 

This is the second in a series of blogs on the subject of Cloud Transformation. As we stated in the first blog entry business is being transformed at the speed of cloud. The velocity of this transformation and marketing hype around the subject of cloud could cause a business to move too quickly into the cloud space.

One of the first things any business should develop is a clear business case for embracing cloud technology. Unfortunately, as Gartner points out, most IT organizations are not well trained in the development of business cases. Often the decision of adopting cloud technologies is left in the hands of the financial group. This “full” delegation of that decision usually leads to a stalemate for a variety of reasons.

The following approach for developing your cloud business case is best accomplished with full participation between all parts of your organization from business, finance, HR, IT, etc. This is one technology decision that has significant impacts on all aspects of the business. This is what has led to the use of the term “Digital Transformation” in the business world.

There are two parts to our recommendation. For an organization to make a decision about cloud adoption it must identify the “Business Drivers for Cloud Adoption” and then flush out the “Business Case for Cloud Adoption”. There are many things to consider within each area.

Business Drivers

At the beginning of any effort to start Cloud Transformation it is critical to answer the “Why” question from a business and technology perspective. There are many different reasons why an organization would like to execute a Cloud Transformation. The following drivers are some of the common ones that we have identified.

1. Security – What is becoming clear about cloud across most industry segments is that most public cloud providers have a more secure environment than most private data centers. Some organizations will be able to improve their security/risk profile with a movement to public cloud.
2. Compliance – In the early days of the public cloud, compliance was not at the forefront of most offerings. Today, the top two providers offer full compliance environments to meet many different standards for governments, healthcare, financial, etc..
3. Cost – This is a tough one for most organizations primarily due to the differences in the way to count the cost between on premise and in the cloud. There are many different free calculators online now which can help an organization with the comparison. Organizations must be honest about including “ALL” of their cost and fully understand what is the real cost of the cloud.
4. Performance – Like many other drivers this one can be evaluated using different types of performance measurements. This can be Business performance, People performance, Application or system performance, etc..
5. Expansion without Construction – As most organizations will recognize it is very expensive to build new data center space and equip it with all the required components. If a business unit wishes to “try out” expansion into a new business arena with a lower probability of success it is tough to justify data center expansion. Yet, this is exactly what is required in today’s new Digitally Transformed business world.
6. Access to more tool’s with a pay per use model – In the same thought pattern as the “Expansion without Construction” driver, this one allows an organization to try out new tools on a subscription basis. Many cloud offerings will allow an organization to reduce cost, improve uptime, and improve performance with a very low cost approach.
7. Digital Transformation of the business to maintain and grow the business – Almost all Digital Transformation’s will include some kind of cloud based technology implementation. The speed at which industries and markets are changing simply requires a new way of delivering current products and services. That same speed is what is often driving the delivery of totally new products and services across multiple industries. Cloud technology has provided the platform for these new combinations.
8. Reliability and high availability – It becomes harder and harder for most organizations to maintain their environments over time to guarantee triple 9’s uptime. Add the need to maintain or improve performance and it becomes a costly and time consuming effort with minimal ROI.

Business Case Development

Once an organization understands their main drivers for embarking on a Cloud Transformation journey it will have defined set of business drivers. These drivers can then be used to develop the focus and nature (scope) of the business case. Business cases are used in many different parts of the organization for many different reasons. The following business case outline is a starting point for implementing cloud based technologies. This outline should be adjusted based on the type and nature of the chosen business drivers.

1. Why is the organization implementing cloud technology?
   1. Business reasons
   2. Technology reasons
   3. What are the expectations
2. What are the details around the current infrastructure and associated cost
   1. Servers & all related components (network, storage, power, rack space, etc.)
   2. Applications & related cost (licenses, workload mapping to servers, etc.) Movement to SaaS
   3. Data telecom cost
   4. Peak usage allowance for critical systems
   5. Overall Utilization
   6. Databases
   7. Integrations
   8. Facility capabilities, certifications, and cost
   9. Hardware maintenance and management software
3. What are the cost of replicating the same environments in the cloud
   1. Be sure to understand how you would replicate. (Lift and shift is rarely the best way.)
   2. Realize that different public cloud providers have different ways of delivering the same environments and different cost as a result.
   3. Seek assistance if needed to validate how to estimate this cost
   4. Utilize the free cost calculators located on the cloud providers website
      1. Azure Cost Calculator
      2. Azure Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
      3. AWS Cost Calculator
      4. AWS Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
4. What will be the staffing implications and cost
   1. Do you have the skill sets needed or will you require additional resources
   2. Will you need training for current staff?
   3. Will you need professional services to get started?
5. What are the migration cost
   1. Early termination of licenses or contracts
   2. Physical movement of apps and data
   3. Creation of new environments in the cloud
   4. Data connections from on premise to the cloud
6. What are the financial impacts
   1. Capital expense reduction
   2. Operating expense increase
   3. Retained Cash
   4. Reduced Opportunity cost
   5. Increased business revenue
   6. Evaluate five to seven year cost reduction to get more robust view
   7. Consider the use of Gartner’s opportunities for better investment
      1. 
      2. 
7. Benefits and Drawbacks Conclusions/Recommendation
   1. Faster speed to market
   2. Operating expense efficiency
   3. Application Delivery improvement
   4. Facilities consolidation gains

Hopefully, the approach for developing your cloud business was outlined above in a clear and concise manner. With full participation between all parts of your organization from business, finance, HR, IT, etc. this is one technology decision that will have significant impacts on all aspects of the business.

This blog was co-authored by Victor Wolters.

Digital trends at large are putting significant pressure on businesses to innovate quickly and no industries are showing signs of immunity. Customer expectations are rising as is the competition coming from existing market players and an array of recently “born in the cloud” contenders. Businesses must transform to succeed.

In response, companies are turning to digital transformation efforts. These are marked by moves to adopt a digital-first mindset and engage with customers in new ways driven by their ever-increasing expectations in this digital world.  Traditional business models are also being impacted as companies look to increase their organizational velocity. Companies must increasingly focus on connecting people, processes, and things to construct new value for customers.

Cloud Enables Digital Transformation

Cloud technologies are often found at the core of many of these digital business shifts. Cloud provides for the speed, innovation, and scale necessary for re-imagining business in the digital age. We should view cloud as an enabler of change but not the principal goal of transformation. It will support and accelerate the journey, but business and technology professionals need to be careful not to conflate the vehicle used to power the journey with the destination.

Most business and IT leaders are no longer questioning if they should be leveraging the cloud, the question is now most certainly focused on how. The cost of not acting on cloud as an opportunity has been evaluated and for most the math is showing a sum too great to ignore. Cloud is a required component for digital transformation success.

More Than a Deployment Model

But to understand how to leverage it it’s important to first know what it is. Cloud is much more than a deployment model. It has matured beyond just categories of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Services (SaaS) [1]. It has matured into a systems of interconnected capabilities which are enabling business to transform at a rapid pace, to transform at the speed of cloud.

Cloud encompasses these interconnected capabilities that are changing the way we design, build, and run applications and construct them into boarder solutions.  The way applications are designed for cloud is different than the previous monolithic approaches. The focus is on modern designs like functions as a service (FaaS), microservice architecture, and event streams. The approach to building applications is rapidly transforming from manually intensive releases to software defined infrastructure and fully automated pipelines. The platforms themselves are shifting as well with a rapidly growing adoption of container and other cloud native platforms.

These capabilities are establishing the new model of getting things done supported by a modern collection of tools and services. They are all being categorized under the umbrella of cloud, but they are quickly outpacing their namesake.

Cloud Transformation

We refer to cloud transformation then as the act of an organization adopting cloud, in the broadest sense, and all the implications of that change. Given the scope and rapid pace of change in cloud technologies it will be a complicated task for any organization to start. But true digital transformation requires it. Establishing new and engaging experiences for your customers, optimizing your business processes, and constructing new value won’t happen without it.

Through this blog series we’ll provide a more detailed perspective on how organizations can succeed in their cloud transformation journey.

Next post we’ll discuss the motivations and factors of change. Including the typical drivers and how to build a business case for change.

This blog was co-authored by Victor Wolters.

Since the news broke about the Red Hat acquisition by IBM, there has been no shortage of articles analyzing the move, predicting its outcomes, and delivering judgments on the deal. But what about the perspective of the software developer, architect, or IT leader who has to make decisions about which capabilities to leverage from these, now potentially competing, software offerings?

There are obvious complementary products in Red Hat and IBM’s portfolios, which serve as the basis for the bet that IBM has made. That being said, I haven’t seen much focus on the overlap between the two software portfolios. This is a common problem with acquisitions and will not be anything new for enterprise software customers. There have been many situations in which software users have had to rationalize capabilities across portfolio products. If you’ve been around IBM since the ESB days, you’ll remember the confusion of having three options: IBM DataPower, IBM ESB, and Message Broker (now called IBM Integration Bus).

The product marketing teams eventually brought clarity to where the different products should play, but there was a period of time when customers were left in the lurch.

I’d like to briefly look at a couple of the overlaps I see between the two portfolios, and provide some insight into resolving the conflicts.

Hybrid Cloud: IBM Cloud vs OpenShift

How are hybrid cloud IBM Bluemix and OpenShift overlapping?

OpenShift is one of the most discussed products of the acquisition analysis and understandably so. It’s where most of the action will be over the next couple years and is a key component of IBM’s strategy to reset and establish itself as a leader in the hybrid-cloud market.

IBM Cloud Private, previously IBM Bluemix Private, is serving specifically as the IBM private cloud offering and has been, from a customer perspective, in competition with OpenShift for the last couple years. I believe IBM recognized that OpenShift had been making significant gains in the application platform / cloud-native development market when they announced a partnership in May of this year that certified IBM cloud private offerings to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift.

Whether that move was in anticipation of the acquisition or not, it was at least an acknowledgment of OpenShift’s container management positioning in the market. The realized benefit for those who have an existing investment in IBM products is the ability to now run a containerized version of IBM’s software offerings on OpenShift. This will almost certainly be the direction of the platform evolution.

Note: Perficient has a PaaS evaluation toolkit, which we use to assist customers as they evaluate cloud-native application platforms and make a determination as to which is the best fit for them. We historically have seen Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Private/Bluemix, Rancher, and others in this mix.  

DevOps: UrbanCode vs Ansible

Another interesting area of capability overlap is within IBM and Red Hat’s DevOps tooling. IBM’s UrbanCode and Red Hat’s Ansible Automation provide some of the same IT automation functionality, although in quite different ways, including application deployment, infrastructure provisioning, and orchestration.

IBM entered into the DevOps space in earnest through the UrbanCode acquisition in 2013. Big Blue was looking to catapult itself ahead in the DevOps war, along with CA, BMC, and a host of open source projects. IBM already had some DevOps capabilities being built out in the Rational brand, but they were often more complicated and expensive in comparison to the alternatives.

Red Hat acquired Ansible, a rising open source star, several years later. It was a logical addition to the portfolio that eventually aligned well with their OpenShift offering.

It is hard to predict at this point where IBM will take these tools, but I don’t believe it is a zero-sum game. There are plenty of opportunities for alignment across the tools with Ansible leaning on their infrastructure / provisioning focus and UrbanCode providing the application focus and single pane of glass across the entire tool chain.

Even More Overlap

There are other interesting areas where these two companies have competing offerings, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM’s AIX. There are also less interesting overlaps, such as Red Hat’s JBoss and IBM’s WebSphere Application Server, both of which are being overtaken by simpler ways to deploy applications like containers, Spring frameworks, etc.

In Closing

Nothing is official yet. There’s a long road ahead before we’ll see significant shifts in either portfolio, but customers of both should keep a close eye on how things start shaping up. I know I will be.

Read more in our series on the IBM acquisition of Red Hat here.