{"id":16621,"date":"2015-08-14T08:28:10","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T08:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businesscloudnews.com\/?p=232841"},"modified":"2015-08-14T08:28:10","modified_gmt":"2015-08-14T08:28:10","slug":"a-tale-of-two-its","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/a-tale-of-two-its\/","title":{"rendered":"A tale of two ITs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Werner<\/a><\/p>\n

Werner Knoblich, senior vp\u00a0and gm of Red Hat in EMEA<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Gartner calls it \u2018bimodal IT\u2019; Ovum calls it \u2018multimodal IT\u2019; IDC calls it the \u2018third platform\u2019. Whatever you choose to call it, they are all euphemisms for the same evolutions in IT: a shift towards deploying more user-centric, mobile-friendly software and services that more scalable, flexible and easily integrated than the previous generation of IT services. And while the cloud has evolved as an essential delivery mechanism for the next generation of services, it\u2019s also prompting big changes in IT says Werner Knoblich, senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat in EMEA.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe challenge with cloud isn\u2019t really a technology one,\u201d Knoblich explains, \u201cbut the requirements of how IT needs to change in order to support these technologies and services. All of the goals, key metrics, ways of doing business with vendors and service providers have changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of what Knoblich is saying may resonate with any large organisation managing a large legacy estate that wants to adopt more mobile and cloud services; the \u2018two ITs can be quite jarring.<\/p>\n

The chief goal used to be reliability; now it\u2019s agility. In the traditional world of IT the focus was on price for performance; now it\u2019s about customer experience. In traditional IT the most common approach to development was the classic \u2018waterfall\u2019 approach \u2013 requirements, design, implementation, verification, maintenance; now it\u2019s all about agile and continuous delivery.<\/p>\n

Most assets requiring management were once physical; now they\u2019re all virtualised machines and microservices. The applications being adopted today aren\u2019t monolithic beasts as they were traditionally, but modular, cloud-native apps running in Linux containers or platforms like OpenStack (or both).<\/p>\n

Not just the suppliers \u2013 but also the way they are sourced \u2013 has changed. In the traditional world long-term, large-scale multifaceted deals were the norm; now, there are lots of young, small suppliers, contracted in short terms or on a pay-as-you-go basis.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou really need a different kind of IT, and people who are very good in the traditional mode aren\u2019t necessarily the ones that will be good in this new hybrid world,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not just hybrid cloud but hybrid IT.\u201d<\/p>\n

The challenges are cultural, organisational, and technical. According to the 2015 BCN Annual Industry Survey, which petitioned over 700 senior IT decision makers, over 67 per cent of enterprises plan to implement multiple cloud services over the next 18 months, but close to 70 per cent were worried about how those services would integrate with other cloud services and 90 per cent were concerned about how they will integrate those cloud services with their legacy or on-premise services.<\/p>\n

That said, open source technologies that also make use of open standards play a massive role in ensuring cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-legacy integrations are achievable and, where possible, seamless \u2013 one of the main reasons why Linux containers are gaining so much traction and mind share today (workload portability). And open source technology is something Red Hat knows a thing or two about.<\/p>\n

Beyond its long history in server and desktop OSs (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and middleware (JBoss) the company is a big sponsor and early backer of Open Stack, increasingly popular cloud building software built on a Linux foundation. It helped create an open source platform as a service, OpenShift. The company is also working on Atomic Host, an open source container-based hosting mechanism for a slimmed down version of RHEL with support for other open source container technologies including Kubernetes and Docker, the darlings of the container community.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur legacy in open source is extremely important and even more important in cloud than the traditional IT world,\u201d Knoblich says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the innovation happening today in cloud is open source \u2013 think of Docker, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and you can\u2019t really think of one pure proprietary offering that can match these in terms of the pace of innovation and the rate at which new features are being added,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

But many companies, mostly the large supertankers, don\u2019t yet see themselves as ready to embrace these new technologies and platforms \u2013 not just because they don\u2019t have the type or volume of workloads to migrate, because they require a huge cultural and organisational shift. And cultural as well as organisational shifts are typically rife with political struggles, resentment, and budgetary wrestling.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t just install OpenStack or Dockerise your applications and \u2018boom\u2019, you\u2019re ready for cloud \u2013 it just doesn\u2019t work that way. Many of the companies that are successfully embracing these platforms and digitising their organisations set up a second IT department that operates in parallel to the traditional one, and can only seed out the processes and practices \u2013 and technologies \u2013 they\u2019ve embraced when critical mass is reached. Unless that happens, they risk getting stuck back in the traditional IT mentality.\u201d<\/p>\n

An effective open hybrid approach ultimately means not only embracing the open source solutions and technologies, but recognising that some large, monolithic applications \u2013 say, Cobol-based mainframe apps \u2013 won\u2019t make it into this new world; neither will the processes needed to maintain those systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor some industries, like insurance for instance, there isn\u2019t a recognised need to ditch those systems and processes. But for others, particularly those being heavily disrupted, that\u2019s not the case. Look at Volkswagen. They don\u2019t just see Mercedes, BMW and Tesla as competitors \u2013 they see Google and Apple as competitors too because the car becomes a technology platform for services.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo industry is secure from disruption, particularly from players that scarcely existed a few years ago, which is why IT will be multi-modal for many, many years to come,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n

This interview was developed in partnership with Red Hat<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gartner calls it ‘bimodal IT’; Ovum calls it ‘multimodal IT’; IDC calls it the ‘third platform’. Whatever you choose to call it, they are all euphemisms for the same evolutions in IT: a shift towards deploying more user-centric, mobile-friendly software and services that more scalable, flexible and easily integrated than the previous generation of IT services. And while the cloud has evolved as an essential delivery mechanism for the next generation of services, it’s also prompting big changes in IT says Werner Knoblich, senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat in EMEA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1989,1990,1991,578,3242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-it","category-features","category-interviews","category-red-hat","category-werner-knoblich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16622,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16621\/revisions\/16622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}