CIOs and CTOs are developing comprehensive hybrid IT infrastructure models, in response to growing demand from CFOs and line of business leaders that request access to applications hosted via both on-premises private cloud and off-premises public cloud offerings.

That’s why savvy technology leaders must therefore align with the most qualified vendors and service providers that enable them to manage and support these complex multi-cloud scenarios. Furthermore, the chosen provider must demonstrate vertical industry knowledge and prior experience.

A major shift is taking place in how enterprises select their financial management applications, with a migration to cloud applications happening faster than expected, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

Multi-cloud service market development

A recent Gartner survey of senior finance executives found that by 2020, 36 percent of enterprises will use the cloud to support more than half of their transactional systems of record (SoR) requirements.

Gartner surveyed 439 global senior financial executives (including 410 who had implemented cloud strategic and financial corporate performance management solutions) from January through March 2017 to explore their technology perspective, influence of IT, needs and priorities in technology investment.

Key findings from the survey include:

• Organisations of all sizes are moving to cloud solutions, such as core financial applications, for transactional systems of record.
• Cloud momentum is consistently higher across financial business applications year-over-year.
• Business analytics and enterprise business applications continue as top investment initiatives for senior financial executives.

According to the survey, smaller and midsize organisations are adopting cloud services more rapidly than larger organisations, with 44.6 percent of smaller organisations, 37.7 percent of midsize enterprises and 40.4 percent of large organisations planning to move to the cloud over the next three years.

“We have found that most clients asking about these financial business application markets are solely interested in the cloud option,” said John Van Decker, vice president at Gartner. “Many enterprises that currently run on-premises solutions want to move to newer solutions that put more control in the hands of the end user, and reduce the effort required when compared with on-premises upgrades.”

Gartner has found that the human capital management and procure-to-pay markets have already been migrating their business applications to the cloud, while the office of finance has been slower to move.

However, things are changing for the finance organisation. CFOs are usually more conservative about moving their data to the cloud, however, given the current change in the market there will be a steady migration over the next five to 10 years.

Outlook for multi-cloud service adoption

Multi-cloud solutions are still developing and do not have uniform capability to meet the needs of all industry verticals, company size and local markets. CIOs and CTOs will need to do their due diligence when evaluating integrated cloud solutions in these markets.

“The Gartner survey showed that 93 percent of enterprises see the cloud being utilised for half of enterprise transactions in the future,” said Van Decker.

According to the Gartner assessment, ongoing adoption of cloud services has changed the environment for financial management business applications. Vendors have responded with new and re-architected integrated platforms that incorporate cloud-based applications, and most have de-emphasised traditional stand-alone on-premises solutions.

As businesses evolve, they need technology that is simple to help them succeed today and flexible enough to help them build for tomorrow. Chrome is fit for the workplace of the future — providing a secure, consistent user experience across a range of devices that can be used anywhere.
In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, will take a look at various options as to how ChromeOS can be leveraged to interact with people on the devices, and formats they already love to use.

read more

Join IBM November 1 at 21st Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, and learn how IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems.
Cognitive analysis impacts today’s systems with unparalleled ability that were previously available only to manned, back-end operations. Thanks to cloud processing, IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems. Imagine a robot vacuum that becomes your personal assistant that knows everything and can respond to your emotions and verbal commands!

read more

Many companies start their journey to the cloud in the DevOps environment, where software engineers want self-service access to the custom tools and frameworks they need. Machine learning technology can help IT departments keep up with these demands.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ajay Gulati, Co-Founder, CTO and Board Member at ZeroStack, will discuss the use of machine learning for automating provisioning of DevOps resources, taking the burden off IT teams.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cedexis will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cedexis is the leader in data-driven enterprise global traffic management. Whether optimizing traffic through datacenters, clouds, CDNs, or any combination, Cedexis solutions drive quality and cost-effectiveness.

read more

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?
Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter?
How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations?
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, will answer these questions and demonstrate techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances and cost-effective resources on AWS, coupled with the ability to deliver a minimum set of functionalities that cover the majority of needs – without configuration complexity.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Yuasa System will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Yuasa System is introducing a multi-purpose endurance testing system for flexible displays, OLED devices, flexible substrates, flat cables, and films in smartphones, wearables, automobiles, and healthcare.

read more

• 84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.
• 83% believe AI is a strategic priority for their businesses today.
• 75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures.

These and many other fascinating insights are from the Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review study published this week, Reshaping Business With Artificial Intelligence. An online summary of the report is available here. The survey is based on interviews with more than 3,000 business executives, managers, and analysts in 112 countries and 21 industries. For additional details regarding the methodology, please see page 4.

The research found significant gaps between companies who have already adopted and understand Artificial Intelligence (AI) and those lagging. AI early adopters invest heavily in analytics expertise and ensuring the quality of algorithms and data can scale across their enterprise-wide information and knowledge needs. The leading companies who excel at using AI to plan new businesses and streamline existing processes all have solid senior management support for each AI initiative.

Key takeaways include the following:

72% of respondents in the technology, media, and telecommunications industry expect AI to have a significant impact on product offerings in the next five years

The technology, media and telecommunications industry has the highest expectations for AI to accelerate new product and service offerings of all industries tracked in the study, projecting a 52% point increase in the next five years. AI-based improvements are expected to deliver Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) gains in the Financial Services and Professional Services industries as well. The following graphic compares expectations for AI’s expected contributions to business offerings and process improvements over the next five years by industry.

Customer-facing activities including marketing automation, support, and service in addition to IT and supply chain management are predicted to be the most affected areas by AI in the next five years

Demand management, supply chain optimisation, more efficient distributed order management systems, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that can scale to support new business models are a few of the many areas AI will make contributions to the in the next five years. The following graphic provides an overview of operations, IT, customer-facing, and corporate center functions where AI is predicted to contribute.

84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage

75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures. The research shows that AI will be the catalyst of entirely new business models and change the competitive landscape of entire industries in the next five years. 69% of respondents expect incumbent competitors in their industry to use AI to gain an advantage. 63% believe the pressure to reduce costs will require their organisations to use AI in the next five years.

Despite high expectations for AI, only 23% of respondents have incorporated it into processes and product and service offerings today

An additional 23% have one or more pilots in progress, and 54% have no adoption plans in progress, 22% of which have no current plans. The following graphic provides insights into the current adoption of AI with survey respondents.

By completing a cluster analysis of survey respondents based on AI understanding and adoption questions, four distinct maturity groups emerged including Pioneers, Investigators, Experimenters, and Passives

19% of the respondent base is Pioneers or those organisations who understand and are adopting AI. The study says that “these organisations are on the leading edge of incorporating AI into both their organisation’s offerings and internal processes.” Investigators (32%) are organisations that understand AI but are not deploying it beyond the pilot stage. Experimenters (13%) are organisations that are piloting or adopting AI without deep understanding. Passives (36%) are organisations with no adoption or much knowledge of AI.

Pioneers and Investigators are finding new ways to use AI to create entirely new sources of business value

Pioneers (91%) and Investigators (90%) are much more likely to report that their organisation recognises how AI affects business value than Experimenters (32%) and Passives (23%). One of the most differentiating aspects of the four maturity clusters is understanding the differences and value of investing in high-quality data and advanced AI algorithms. Compared to Passives, Pioneers are 12 times more likely to understand the process for training algorithms and ten times more likely to comprehend the development costs of AI-based products and services.

Organisations in the Pioneer cluster excel at analytics expertise versus competitors and have exceptional data governance processes in place, further accelerating their AI-driven growth

Pioneers are excellent at change management, citing their senior management’s vision and leadership as a foundational strength in accomplishing their AI-based initiative Early adopter Pioneers are also adept at product development, capable of changing existing products and services to take advantage of new technologies.

61% of all organisations interviewed see developing an AI strategy as urgent, yet only 50% have one done today

The research found that regarding company size, the largest companies (those with more than 100K employees) are the most likely to have an AI strategy, but only half (56%) have one. The following graphic compares the percentage of respondents by maturity cluster who say developing a plan for Al is urgent for their organisation relative to those that have a strategy in place today.

70% of respondents are personally looking forward to delegating the more mundane, repetitive aspects of their jobs to AI

84% believe employees will need to change their skill sets to excel at delivering AI-based initiatives and strategies. Taking this approach provides career growth and a chance to become more marketable for many whose jobs that are being increasingly automated. Cautious optimism regarding AI’s effects on employment dominates early adopter organisations, not dire fatalism. The bottom line is that AI is providing opportunities for career growth that will only accelerate in the future. Those that seize the chance to learn and earn more will end up having AI removing the mundane tasks from their jobs, leaving more time for the most challenging and rewarding work.

Editor’s note: To read more about artificial intelligence news, analysis and opinion, visit our sister publication AI News.

Three quarters of organisations would be willing to pay a premium to enhance their cloud services, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

In the latest from its Voice of the Enterprise series – this time around organisational dynamics in hosting and cloud managed services – the research firm found that companies were most likely to pay more for security guarantees than anything else.

Just under half (48.7%) of those polled said they would pay to enhance their security, ahead of guaranteed uptime and performance metrics (43.3%), enhanced customer service (33.6%), and operational management (26.4%). Yet when it came to how much organisations were prepared to pay, customer service came out on top, ahead of security, uptime and operational management respectively.

The research also found gaps between current offerings and customer expectations. More than half (58.1%) of the 600 IT professionals polled said they see managed services, or security services, bundled in with infrastructure or applications as important to them, yet only two in five (38.8%) say their current vendors offer this capability to a satisfactory level. Only one in five said their vendors meet their expectation when it comes to migrating workloads to and from data centres.

“We frequently talk about pricing competition in cloud infrastructure and applications, which leaves many service providers wondering how they can differentiate themselves,” said Liam Eagle, study author and research manager at 451. “The good news is that many customers tell us they’re evaluating vendors on value, rather than cost. That value can reside in services like guaranteed levels of performance, security and support.”

This is the latest in the company’s missives around cloud and hosted services and strategy. Last month, 451 argued the majority of IT managers were examining a mix of on- and off-premises computing resources in their organisations, rather than “blindly following the pack” to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) et al. Two thirds of respondents said they found recruiting for roles across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure difficult.

DevSecOps – a trend around transformation in process, people and technology – is about breaking down silos and waste along the software development lifecycle and using agile methodologies, automation and insights to help get apps to market faster. This leads to higher quality apps, greater trust in organizations, less organizational friction, and ultimately a five-star customer experience.
These apps are the new competitive currency in this digital economy and they’re powered by data. Without data or data-based interactions, these apps would be of little value to the user and would be just static one-dimensional bulletin boards. Imagine a banking app, for example, that does not give you data about your account or let you take some action. How much value is this bringing to the user?

read more