Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Citrix and HPE team to bring simplicity to the hybrid core-cloud-edge architecture

One of the key elements of digital transformation is aligning core, cloud, and edge computing using the latest architectures and efficiencies. Yet new levels of simplicity are needed to satisfy all the requirements for both end users and IT operators.

The next BriefingsDirect IT solutions ecosystem profile interview examines how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are specifically aligned to help bring such digital transformation benefits to a broad, global market.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more about the venerable and always-innovative Citrix-HPE partnership, BriefingsDirect sat down with executives Jim Luna, Senior Director for Global Alliances at Citrix, and Jeff Carlat, Senior Director of Global Alliances at HPE. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Jim, what trends are driving the need for more innovation around mobile workspaces?

Luna
Luna: As customers embark through digital transformation they still need to access their apps, data, and desktops from anywhere. With the advent of 5G wireless, and new network connectivity, we need to allow customers to be able to get their data and apps from any device as well. So we see a transformation in the marketplace.

Carlat: We are also looking at a new workforce coming in, the millennials, and they realize the traditional way of going to your job is totally being changed. To be able to be at work anytime, anyplace, anywhere -- and removing the barriers of where work is – that is driving us to co-innovate. We are delivering solutions that allow the freedom to be more efficient anywhere.

Gardner: There’s a chicken-and-egg relationship. On one hand, the core, cloud, and edge can work in tandem to allow for safe, secure, and compliant data and applications sharing activities. And that encourages people to change their work behaviors, to become more productive. It’s hard to decide, which is leading which?

Work anywhere, anytime on any device 

Luna: Traditionally, people had a desktop with applications, and they wanted that particular image replicated throughout their environment. But with the advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that are web-delivered, they now need more of a management workspace, if you will, that allows them to work with any type of application -- whether it’s being delivered locally, on-premises, or through a cloud-based SaaS application. Delivering a unified workspace anywhere becomes critical for them.

Carlat: We also have requirements around security -- increasing the security of data and personal files. This forces us to work together, to take that workspace but not have it sitting in a vulnerable laptop left in a Starbucks. Instead that desktop sits back in the comfort and safety of a locked-up data center.

Luna: People want a simple experience. They don’t want a complicated experience as they access their apps and data. So, simplicity becomes key. User experience (UX) becomes key. And choice becomes key as well.
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Carlat: On expectations of simplicity and UX, if I find it hard to log-in to SharePoint I may just give up and say, “Well, I’m not going to be using those services.” It’s so easy to just move to the next item on your list.

Like I said, with millennials, that’s the expectation. It’s a mandatory requirement. If we can’t deliver that ease of experience to them, others will.

Gardner: User expectations are higher. They want flexibility. They want to be more productive anywhere. We know the technologies are available to accomplish this.

What’s holding back organizations from executing? How are Citrix and HPE together forming a whole greater than the sum of the parts to help businesses execute on this vision?

Collaborate to simplify 

Luna: Traditionally it’s been the complexity of the deployment of the architecture -- both on the hardware side, as well as on the software side. The things that we are doing together are simplifying that process from a deployment perspective, from a manageability perspective, from a support perspective, as well as the other features of experience, security, and choice.

We are working to simplify the experience -- not just in terms of managing and deploying, but also to make sure that that end-user experience is simplified as well.

Gardner: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been around for some time, but earlier there were issues around network capacity, and certain media formats lagged. These performance issues have been largely put to rest. How does that factor into accelerating mobile workspaces adoption?

Carlat
Carlat: In the 22 years of my IT experience at Compaq and HPE, I’ve seen the processor compute power increase significantly. The network, storage, and other inhibitors, from a technology standpoint, are pretty much gone now.

It moves the problem away from the infrastructure to the complexity issue. How do you unleash that potential in a manner that is easy to consume. That’s the next level.

Luna: One of the other things our partnership allows is more choice. With HPE infrastructure, we have a variety of different choices available to customers, according to their unique requirements. There is now choice in terms of the architecture that better suits their deployment requirements.

Gardner: We’ve heard about hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) helping people on deployments. We’ve heard about appliance models. Are these part of that new choice?

Carlat: Yes, that’s why we have come together. We are delivering workspace appliances with Citrix on top of our HPE SimpliVity HCI portfolio.

Not only is a customer going to capture the benefits of everything that’s gone into our SimpliVity HCI platform, but we marry it with the world that Citrix provides for VDI, virtual applications, and mobile desktops.

Luna: On one hand, we’re making it easier for established customers to manage their Citrix environments through a simplified management plane with Citrix Cloud Services. But by having the security of that data sitting locally on a SimpliVity appliance -- that’s really good for customers in terms of data governance, data control, and data security.

But there are other architectures for other segments, like in the financial services industry, where we have trader workstations that provide multi-monitor support and high graphics capabilities. So, choice is key.
By having the security of the data sitting locally on an HPE SimpliVity appliance -- that's good for customers in terms of governance, data control, and data security.

Carlat: Yes, as these traders are executing trades, any latency is going to eliminate your technology from being used. So there are very, very strict in requirements around latency or performance, as well as security. There are also benefits on total cost, space, and being able to deliver a very rich media environment. Sometimes it’s upward of six monitors, they have to be patched into this, too.

Through the capabilities we have coming together – of bridging our leading infrastructure with the Citrix portfolio -- it makes a magical combination that can be easily deployed, and it just works.

Gardner: As I mentioned, we want to provide more simplicity for IT operators. One of the things that Citrix has been working out for years is intelligent network capabilities. How Citrix is addressing simplicity around these requirements?

Cloud-control solutions

Luna: Citrix is moving to a cloud service model where these technologies are available through a cloud-control plane, whether that’s VDI, or gateway-as-a-service, or a load-balancer-as-a-service. All of those things can be provisioned from a central plane, on-premises or on a customer’s device. And those are solutions we can deliver whether it is on a standard HPE ProLiant DL380 server, or whether it’s SimpliVity HCI, or whether that’s on HPE Moonshot or a Synergy composable infrastructure environment. Those architectures simply can be delivered and managed through a cloud service onto HPE infrastructures.

Gardner: We’ve also been hearing about complexity of hybrid IT models. Not only we are asking folks to implement things like VDI in workspaces, but now they have to make choices about private, public cloud, or some combination.

How does the Citrix and HPE alliance help manage the gap between public and private cloud?
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Carlat: We are aligned, HPE and Citrix, in our view of how IT and consumers are going to bridge and use public cloud resources. We believe there is a right mix, a hybrid approach, where you are going to have both on-premises and the cloud.

At HPE we have several tools to help the brokering of applications between on-premises to off-premises. And we provide that flexibility and choice in an agnostic manner.

Luna: We’ve recognized that the world is a hybrid cloud world. The public cloud has a lot more complexity due to the number and choice of public cloud providers. So we are not only driving hybrid cloud solutions -- we also have value-added services such as HPE Pointnext that allows customers to incrementally define their architecture, better deploy that architecture, and better manage those services to allow for a better customer experience overall.

Gardner: We are also thinking nowadays about the edge for many kinds of devices, such as sensors on a factory floor. Is this an area where the alliance between Citrix and HPE can be brought to bear? How does the Internet of things (IoT) relate to what you do?

Explosion at the edge 

Carlat: We see exploding growth at the edge. And we define the edge as anything not in the data center. Increasingly more-and-more of the analytics and the insights will be derived at the edge. We are already doing a lot with Citrix.

A major financial institution with hundreds of thousands of clients is using the edge and our HPE and Citrix technologies together. This market is only going to grow -- and the requirements increase from scalability to usability.

The edge can also be grimy; it can be a very difficult physical environment. We take all of that into account across the whole solution stack to ensure that we are providing the expected experience.

Luna: Performance is key. As we look at the core to edge, we have a distributed model that allows for data to stay as close as possible to that end-customer -- and therefore provide the best performance and experience. And the best analytics.

We must consider, can we grab the data necessary that’s being accessed at that particular endpoint and transmit that data back? Can we provide telemetry to the customer for managing that environment and making that environment even better for the customer?

In our case, the Citrix Analytics Service is part of our offering. To pull that data and serve that up to the customer in a manner that they are able to manage in that environment is a plus.

Analytics offer insight

Gardner: Analytics certainly becomes an important requirement. We have analytics at the edge; we have analytics in the cloud. We are not just talking about delivering apps; we are talking about first managing data -- and then taking that data and making it actionable. How does the data and the data analysis factor into what you are doing?

Carlat: Increasingly we see the shift to a consumption-based delivery of IT.  Our HPE GreenLake services provide capabilities for customers to not be mired in maintaining and monitoring all the infrastructure -- but actually just consume it on an as-needed basis. So that’s a one-key element.

Luna: Citrix is coming out with a Citrix Analytics Service, and we started that with VDI. But now that is expanding across the entire set of product portfolios from ShareFile, to NetScaler, Gateways, Load Balancers, et cetera. The idea is to unify all that data so that it is seamless to the customer. Now, that combines with all the analytics data coming out of the infrastructure to provide the customer with a one-pane-of-glass view.
It all comes down to taking advantage of the technology and progress we have made together to deliver insights and business benefits without jacking up the complexity that acts as a barrier to adoption.

Carlat: Using the data and analytics allow you to derive insights, and more accurate insights. We want to give a competitive leg up to our customers, clients, and partners. Those who have a leg up win more, make more money, are more efficient, and have happier clients. Therefore it all comes down to taking advantage, if you will, of the technology and the progress we have and pushing the edge of that envelope, bringing it into a package that delivers insights and business benefit without jacking up the complexity that makes it be a barrier to adoption.

Luna: You’re really empowering the customer to have better knowledge about their environment. And with better knowledge comes better performance in their manageability overall.

Gardner: Where are organizations leveraging the HPE-Citrix alliance in such a way that we can point to them and say, this is how it works?

Real-world success stories 

Carlat: One example is in engineering design. Imagine the amount of horsepower it takes in workstations to do computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). There’s solids modeling and major computational design elements. To purchase the infrastructure and have it at your desk can be quite expensive, and it can increase security risk.

Citrix and HPE have offerings, combined with our Edgeline and HCI systems, that provide the right experience, and really rich graphics and content. And we are able to provide that securely, with the data contained in a structured environment.

Luna: Another segment is healthcare. Because of HIPAA regulations, Citrix VDI is consumed in many healthcare organizations today, whether it’s large hospitals or clinics. That’s one of the environments where we see an opportunity to deliver on the power of both HPE and Citrix, by allowing that data to be secured and managed centrally yet providing the performance and the access on any device -- whether it’s the patient room, or the doctor’s clinic, or anywhere.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. As we seek to head off complexity, how will HPE OneSphere bolster your alliance?

Trusted together over time

Luna: We are always looking at innovating together. We are looking at the possibilities for joint work and development. HPE OneSphere presents an opportunity where we provide a single pane of glass view of customers as they look to deploy Citrix workloads. That could be through a central management plane, like OneSphere, or going onto a public cloud and being able to compare pricing and workloads.

It can also be about managing a hybrid cloud through HPE infrastructure, and managing all of that seamlessly, whether it’s in a private-hybrid cloud environment or through a public cloud and providing analytics. So we are continuing to look at those solutions that provide innovation for our customers.

Gardner: Jeff it seems that the opportunity to manage a multi-cloud world is certainly an attractive opportunity for you going out to alliance partners like Citrix.
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Carlat: Yes, exactly. That’s an expectation of what consumers will be moving to in the future. It’s not a one-stop shop. We need to be agnostic. To me, HPE and Citrix are totally aligned to where we see the future going with regards to hybrid cloud. And by first having that commonality of strategy and vision, it just makes is easy to snap our stuff together and create these solutions that are delighting our customers.

Luna: I think at the end of the day our mission is to make Citrix hybrid cloud as best as possible on HPE gear and infrastructure, and that’s what we aim to deliver for our customers.

Gardner: And I suppose it’s important for us to point out that this isn’t a Johnny-come-lately relationship. You have been working together for some time. A great deal of the installed base for Citrix is on HPE kit.

Carlat: Yes, our relationship is built on 22 years of history between us. We’ve been blessed by customers desiring to land their infrastructure on HPE.
A large portion of Citrix customers run today on HPE. That's a testament to the trust and collaboration within the partnership. It's been a good partnership.

We have an installed base out there of customers who have chosen us in the past and continue to use us. For those customers, we want to provide them a seamless transformation to a new generation of architectures. The natural evolution is there for us to harvest, we just have to do it in ways that meet expectations around usability and experience.

Luna: A large portion of our customers today run their Citrix VDI environments on HPE infrastructure. That’s just a testament to the trust and the collaboration within the partnership. We have had innovation together over the years. That’s been collaboration between our teams, as well the leadership, in bringing new platforms and new solutions out to the marketplace. It’s been a good partnership.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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Friday, August 17, 2018

New strategies emerge to stem the costly downside of complex cloud choices

The next BriefingsDirect hybrid IT management strategies interview explores how jerry-rigged approaches to cloud adoption at many organizations have spawned complexity amid spiraling -- and even unknown -- costs.

We’ll hear now from an IT industry analyst about what causes unwieldy cloud use, and how new tools, processes, and methods are bringing insights and actionable analysis to regain control over hybrid IT sprawl.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

Here to help us explore new breeds of hybrid and multicloud management solutions is Rhett Dillingham, Vice President and Senior Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What makes hybrid and multicloud adoption so complex?

Dillingham: Regardless of how an enterprise has invested in public and private cloud use for the last decade, a lot of them ended up in a similar situation. They have a footprint on at least one or multiple public clouds. This is in addition to their private infrastructure, in whatever degree that private infrastructure has been cloud-enabled and turned into a cloud API-available infrastructure to their developers.

Dillingham
They have this footprint then across the hybrid infrastructure and multiple public clouds. Therefore, they need to decide how they are going to orchestrate on those various infrastructures -- and how they are going to manage in terms of control costs, security, and compliance. They are operating cloud-by-cloud, versus operating as a consolidated group of infrastructures that use common tooling. This is the real wrestling point for a lot of them, regardless of how they got here.

Gardner: Where are we in this as an evolution? Are things going to get worse before they get better in terms of these levels of complexity and heterogeneity?

Dillingham: We’re now at the point where this is so commonly recognized that we are well into the late majority of adopters of public cloud. The vast majority of the market is in this situation. We’re going to get worse from an enterprise market perspective.

We are also at the inflection point of requiring orchestration tooling, particularly with the advent of containers. Container orchestration is getting more mature in a way that is ready for broad adoption and trust by enterprises, so they can make bets on that technology and the platforms based on them.

Control issues 

On the control side, we’re still in the process of sorting out the tooling. You have a number of vendors innovating in the space, and there have been a number of startup efforts. Now, we’re seeing more of the historical infrastructure providers invest in the software capabilities and turning those into services -- whether it’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), VMware, or Cisco, they are all making serious investments into the control aspect of hybrid IT. That’s because their value is private cloud but extends to public cloud with the same need for control.

Gardner: You mentioned containers, and they provide a common denominator approach so that you can apply them across different clouds, with less arduous and specific work than deploying without containerization. The attractiveness of containers comes because the private cloud people aren’t going to help you deal with your public cloud deployment issues. And the public clouds aren’t necessarily going to help you deal with other public clouds or private clouds. Is that why containers are so popular?
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Dillingham: If you go back to the fundamental basis of adoption of cloud and the value proposition, it was first and foremost about agility -- more so than cost efficiency. Containers are a way of extending that value, and getting much deeper into speed of development, time to market, and for innovation and experimentation.

Containerization is an improvement geared around that agility value that furthers cloud adoption. It is not a stark difference from virtual machines (VMs), in the sense of how the vendors support and view it.

So, I think a different angle on that would be that the use of VMs in public cloud was step one, containers was a significant step two that comes with an improved path to the agility and speed value. The value the vendor ecosystem is bringing with the platforms -- and how that works in a portable way across hybrid infrastructures and multi-cloud -- is more easily delivered with containers.

There’s going to be an enterprise world where orchestration runs specific to cloud infrastructure, public versus private, but different on various public clouds. And then there is going to be more commonality with containers by virtue of the Kubernetes project and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) portfolio.

That’s going to deliver for new applications -- and those lifted and shifted into containers -- much more seamless use across these hybrid infrastructures, at least from the control perspective.

Gardner: We seem to be at a point where the number of cloud options has outstripped the ability to manage them. In a sense, the cart is in front of the horse; the horse being hybrid cloud management. But we are beginning to see more such management come to the fore. What does this mean in terms of previous approaches to management?

In other words, a lot of organizations already have management for solving a variety of systems heterogeneity issues. How should the new forms of management for cloud have a relationship with these older management tools for legacy IT?

Dillingham: That is a big question for enterprises. How much can they extend their existing toolsets to public cloud?

A lot of the vendors from the private [infrastructure] sector invested in delivering new management capabilities, but that isn’t where many started. I think the rush to adoption of public cloud -- and the focus on agility over cost-efficiency -- has driven a predominance of the culture of, “We are going to provide visibility and report and guide, but we are not going to control because of the business value of that agility.”
The tools have grown up as a delivery on visibility but not the control of the typical enterprise private infrastructure approach, which is set up for a disruptive orientation to the software and not continuity.

And the tools have grown up as a delivery on that visibility, versus the control of the typical enterprise private infrastructure approach, which is set up for a disruptive orientation to the software and not continuity. That is an advantage to vendors in those different spheres. I see that continuing.

Gardner: You mentioned both agility and cost as motivators for going to hybrid cloud, but do we get to the point where the complexity and heterogeneity spawn a lack of insight and control? Do we get to the point where we are no longer increasing agility? And that means we are probably not getting our best costs either.

Are we at a point where the complexity is subverting our agility and our ability to have predictable total costs?

Growing up in the cloud 

Dillingham: We are still a long away from maturity in effective use of cloud infrastructure. We are still at a point where just understanding what is optimal is pretty difficult across the various purchase and consumption options of public cloud by provider and in comparing that to an accurate cost model for private infrastructure. So, the tooling needs to be in place to support this.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about HPE OneSphere from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where they have invested in delivering some of this comparability and the analytics to enable better decision-making. I see a lot of innovation in that space -- and that’s just the tooling.

There is also the management of the services, where the cloud managed service provider market is continuing to develop beyond just a brokering orientation. There is more value now in optimizing an enterprise’s footprint across various cloud infrastructures on the basis of optimal agility. And also creating value from services that can differentiate among different infrastructures – be it Amazon Web Services (AWS) versus Azure, and Google, and so forth – and provide the cost comparisons.

Gardner: Given that it’s important to show automation and ongoing IT productivity, are these new management tools including new levels of analytics, maybe even predictive insights, into how workloads and data can best become fungible -- and moved across different clouds -- based on the right performance and/or cost metrics?

Is that part of the attractiveness to a multi- and cross-cloud management capability? Does hybrid cloud management become a slippery slope toward impressive analytics and/or performance-oriented automation?

Dillingham: We’ve had investment in the tooling from the cloud providers, the software providers, and the infrastructure providers. Yet the insights have come more from the professional services’ realm than they have from the tooling realm. That’s provided a feedback loop that can now be applied across hybrid- and multi-cloud in a way that hasn’t come from the public cloud provider tools themselves.
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So, where I see the most innovation is from the providers that are trying to address multi-cloud environments and best feed innovation from their customer engagements from professional services. I like the opportunity HPE has to benefit from their acquisitions of Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie, and then feeding those insights back into [product development]. I’ve seen a lot of examples about the work they’re doing in HPE OneSphere in moving those insights into action for customers through analytics.

Gardner: I was also thinking about the Nimble acquisition, and with InfoSight, and the opportunity for that intellectual property to come to bear on this, too.

Dillingham: Yes, which is really harvesting the value of the control and insights of the private infrastructure and the software-defined orientation of private infrastructure in comparison to the public cloud options.

Gardner: Tell us about Rhett Dillingham. You haven’t been an IT industry analyst forever. Please tell us a bit about your background.

Dillingham: I’ve been a longtime product management leader. I started in hardware, at AMD, and moved into software. Before the cloud days, I was at Microsoft. Next I was building out the early capabilities at AWS, such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). Then I went into a portfolio of services at Rackspace, building those out at the platform level and the overall Rackspace public cloud. As the value of OpenStack matured into private use, I worked with a number of enterprises on private OpenStack cloud deployments.

As an analyst, I support project management-oriented, consultative, and go-to-market positioning of our clients.

Gardner: Let’s dwell on the product management side for a bit. Given that the market is still immature, given what you know customers are seeking for a hybrid IT end-state, what should vendors such as HPE be doing in order to put together the right set of functions, processes, and simplicity -- and ultimately, analytics and automation -- to solve the mess among cloud adoption patterns and sprawl?

Clean up the cloud mess 

Dillingham: We talked about automation and orchestration, talked about control of cost, security, and compliance. I think that there is a tooling and services spectrum to be delivered on those. The third element that needs to be brought into the process is the control structure of each enterprise, of what their strategy is across the different infrastructures.

Where are they optimizing on cost based on what they can do in private infrastructure? Where are they setting up decision processes? What incremental services should be adopted? What incremental clouds should be adopted, such as what an Oracle and an IBM are positioning their cloud offerings to be for adoption beyond what’s already been adopted by a client in AWS, Google, and Azure?
The third element that needs to be brought into the process is the control structure of each enterprise, of what their strategy is across the different infrastructures.

I think there’s a synergy to be had across those needs. This spans from the software and services tooling, into the services and managed services, and in some cases when the enterprise is looking for an operational partner.

Gardner: One of the things that I struggle with, Rhett, is not just the process, the technology and the opportunity, but the people. Who in a typical enterprise IT organization should be tasked with such hybrid IT oversight and management? It involves more than just IT.

To me, it’s economics, it’s procurement, it’s contracts. It involves a bit more than red light, green light … on speed. Tell me about who or how organizations need to change to get the right people in charge of these new tools.

Who’s in charge?

Dillingham: More than the individuals, I think this is about the recognition of the need for partnerships between the business units, the development organizations, and the operational IT organization’s arm of the enterprise.

The focus on agility for business value had a lot of the cloud adoption led by the business units and the application development organizations. As the focus on maturity mixes in the control across security and compliance, those are traditional realms of the IT operational organization.

Now there’s the need for decision structure around sourcing -- where how they value incremental capabilities from more clouds and cloud providers is a decision of tradeoffs and complexity. As you were mentioning, of weighing between the incremental value of an additional provider and an incremental service, and portability across those.

What I am seeing in the most mature setups are partnerships across the orientations of those organizations. That includes the acknowledgment and reconciliation of those tradeoffs in long-term portability of applications across infrastructures – against the value of adoption of proprietary capabilities, such as deeper cognitive machine learning (ML) automation and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, which are some of the drivers of the more specific public cloud platform uses.

Gardner: So with adopting cloud, you need to think about the organizational implications and refactor how your business operates. This is not just bolting on a cloud capability. You have to rethink how you are doing business across the board in order to take full advantage.

Dillingham: There is wide recognition of that theme. It gets into the nuts and bolts as you adopt a platform and you determine exactly how the operations function and roles are going to be defined. It means determining who is going to handle what, such as how much you are going to empower developers to do things themselves. With the accountability that results, more tradeoffs are there for them in their roles. But it's almost over-rotation and focus to that out of recognition of it and lack of valuation of that more senior-level decision making in what their cloud strategy is.
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I hear a lot of cloud strategies that are as simple as, “Yes, we are allowing and empowering adoption of cloud by our development teams,” without the second-level recognition of the need to have a strategy for what the guidelines are for that adoption – not in the sense of just controlling costs, but in the sense of: How do you view the value of long-term portability? How do you value strategic sourcing and the ability to negotiate across these providers long-term with evidence and demonstrable portability of your application portfolio?

Gardner: In order to make those proper calls on where you want to go with cloud and to what degree, across which provider, organizations like HPE are coming up with new tools.

So we have heard about HPE OneSphere. We are now seeing HPE’s GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, which is a use of HPE OneSphere management as a service. Is that the way to go? Should we think of cloud management oversight and optimization as a set of services, rather than a product or a tool? It seems to me that a set of services, with an ecosystem behind them, is pretty powerful.

A three-layer cloud 

Dillingham: I think there are three layers to that. One is the tool, whether that is consumed as software or as a service.

Second is the professional consultative services around that, to the degree that you as an enterprise need help getting up to speed in how your organization needs to adjust to benefit from the tools and the capabilities the tools are wrangling.

And then third is a decision on whether you need an operational partner from a managed service provider perspective, and that's where HPE is stepping up and saying we will handle all three of these. We will deliver your tools in various consumption models on through to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, for example, with HPE OneSphere. And we will operate the services for you beyond that SaaS control portal into your infrastructure management, across a hybrid footprint, with the HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud offering. It is very compelling.
HPE is stepping up with OneSphere and saying they will handle delivery of tools, SaaS models, and managed cloud services -- all through a control portal.

Gardner: With so many moving parts, it seems that we need certain things to converge, which is always tricky. So to use the analogy of properly intercepting a hockey puck, the skater is the vendor trying to provide these services, the hockey puck is the end-user organization that has complexity problems, and the ice is a wide-open market. We would like to have them all come together productively at some point in the future.

We have talked about the vendors; we understand the market pretty well. But what should the end-user organizations be starting to do and think in order for them to be prepared to take advantage of these tools? What should be happening inside your development, your DevOps, and that larger overview of process and organization in order to say, “Okay, we’re going to take advantage of that hockey player when they are ready, so that we can really come together and be proficient as a cloud-first organization?”

Commit to an action plan

Dillingham: You need to have a plan in place for each element we have talked about. There needs to be a plan in place for how you are maturing your toolset in cloud-native development… how you are supporting that on the development side from a continuousintegration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) perspective; how you are reconciling that with the operational toolset and the culture of operating in a DevOps model with whatever degree of iterative development you want to enable.

Is the tooling in place from an orchestration and development capability and operations perspective, which can be containers or not? And that gets into container orchestration and the cloud management platforms. There is the control aspect. What tooling you are going to apply there, how you are going to consume that, and how much you want to provide it as a consultative offer? And then how much do you want those options managed for you by an operational partner? And then how you are going to set up your decision-making structure internally?

Every element of that is where you need to be maturing your capabilities. A lot of the starting baseline for the consultative value of a professional services partner is walking you through the decision-making that is common to every organization on each of those fronts, and then enabling a deep discussion of where you want to be in 3, 5, or 10 years, and deciding proactively.

More importantly than anything, what is the goal? There is a lot of oversimplification of what the goal is – such as adoption of cloud and picking of best-of-breed tools -- without a vision yet for where you want the organization to be and how much it benefits from the agility and speed value, and the cost efficiency opportunity.

Gardner: It’s clear that those organizations that can take that holistic view, that have the long-term picture in mind, and can actually execute on it, have a significant advantage in whatever market they are in. Is that fair?
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Dillingham: It is. And one thing that I think we tend to gloss over -- but does exist -- is a dynamic where some of the decision-makers are not necessarily incentivized to think and consider these options on a long-term basis.

The folks who are in role, often for one to three years before moving to a different role or a different enterprise, are going to consider these options differently than someone who has been in role for 5 or 10 years and intends to be there through this full cycle and outcome. I see those decisions made differently, and I think sometimes the executives watching this transpire are missing that dynamic and allowing some decisions to be made that are more short-term oriented than long-term.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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