DevOps is being widely accepted (if not fully adopted) as essential in enterprise IT. But as Enterprise DevOps gains maturity, expands scope, and increases velocity, the need for data-driven decisions across teams becomes more acute. DevOps teams in any modern business must wrangle the ‘digital exhaust’ from the delivery toolchain, «pervasive» and «cognitive» computing, APIs and services, mobile devices and applications, the Internet of Things, and now even blockchain.

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New competitors, disruptive technologies, and growing expectations are pushing every business to both adopt and deliver new digital services. This ‘Digital Transformation’ demands rapid delivery and continuous iteration of new competitive services via multiple channels, which in turn demands new service delivery techniques – including DevOps. In this power panel at @DevOpsSummit 20th Cloud Expo, moderated by DevOps Conference Co-Chair Andi Mann, panelists examined how DevOps helps to meet the demands of Digital Transformation – including accelerating application delivery, closing feedback loops, enabling multi-channel delivery, empowering collaborative decisions, improving user experience, and ultimately meeting (and exceeding) business goals.

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Whenever I write about the cloud, I tend to break it down into three categories: software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS). As I was working on a cloud performance management ebook, a coworker suggested that I also include function as a service (FaaS) and containers as a service (CaaS) in the definitions. I’ll admit, I had never heard of these categories so after these suggestions were made, I went to do some research.

SaaS was one of the first cloud solutions to hit the market. It provides the ability to consume information through a browser or API. IT teams don’t have to manage applications, hardware, security, or storage; everything is managed by the vendor. Users subscribe to a SaaS service on a recurring basis and can easily scale. The uses of SaaS include business productivity, business management, tools, and customer relationship management.

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One of the biggest challenges with adopting a DevOps mentality is: new applications are easily adapted to cloud-native, microservice-based, or containerized architectures – they can be built for them – but old applications need complex refactoring. On the other hand, these new technologies can require relearning or adapting new, oftentimes more complex, methodologies and tools to be ready for production.
In his general session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Brown, Solutions Marketing Manager at Nutanix, explored how Nutanix is bringing these sides together – agility for pets, governance for cattle – in a single unified platform. With this combined approach, Nutanix removes silos – both technological and human – propelling your applications to a new level.

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As DevOps methodologies expand their reach across the enterprise, organizations face the daunting challenge of adapting related cloud strategies to ensure optimal alignment, from managing complexity to ensuring proper governance. How can culture, automation, legacy apps and even budget be reexamined to enable this ongoing shift within the modern software factory?

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Are you open to new ideas, and given a compelling choice are you really prepared to change? That’s what informed CEOs are asking their C-suite leadership team. The context of those questions is about determining who is most qualified to guide the organization’s digital transformation journey. It’s also about setting expectations for C-level executives to partner.
IT and business leaders must acknowledge that they’ve likely reached a significant turning point. Business technology advances are disrupting the legacy status quo and bringing huge market turmoil in their wake. Industries are converging, and unfamiliar competitors are surfacing.

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That world of homogenous IT technology managed entirely by the internal IT organization has long disappeared. Operations today require efficient and global management of technologically heterogeneous environments. The challenges and mistakes organizations make when tackling this important task include: operational disconnects caused by ineffective internal communications; resource contention when multiple, independently developed project plans compete; incompatible technical documentation; and inconsistent communications with vendors.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced it is to acquire Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) to extend its cloud consulting presence and beef up its hybrid IT capabilities.

Cloud Technology Partners, whose SVPs include renowned thought-leader David Linthicum, have specialisms in a variety of environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) – the company announced it had achieved AWS security competency in June – and Google Cloud’s application development specialisation. The company was last month also placed in Fifty Five and Five’s Inbound Marketing Excellence report for the second year running, indicating its renown in the Microsoft partner network.

For HPE, the rationale is straightforward, with CTP moving into HPE Pointnext, the company’s consultancy unit previously known as Enterprise Services. “CTP’s consulting, design and operational advisory services for cloud environments will strengthen our hybrid IT consulting expertise in a fast growing market,” Ana Pinczuk, SVP and GM for HPE Pointnext, explained in a blog post.

“Together, we will be even better positioned to capitalise on this market trend,” Pinczuk added. “The CTP team has built strong customer momentum and will be able to accelerate that momentum by leveraging HPE’s global brand and go-to-market.”

As HPE explained, CTP helps enterprise clients on a three-pronged cloud journey, from migration – determining which applications are optimal for both public and private clouds – to innovation, through technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and machine learning, and operation.

HPE cited a McKinsey study from February which found that spending on hybrid IT consulting and cloud native developments is at approximately $6 billion today, growing at more than 18%. Speaking to The Cube at HPE Discover in June, Pinczuk explained the opportunity ahead. “Nobody owns ‘advise and transform’,” she said. “Nobody owns the whole digital transformation journey. The opportunity there greatly outweighs the constraints that we have in that space.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Gartner says by 2020, a corporate «No-Cloud» Policy will be as rare as a «No-Internet» policy is today and specifically the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market is projected to continue to grow more than 25 percent per year through 2019. This surge in cloud adoption also represents a huge shift in cloud spending by IT organizations, directly or indirectly affecting more than $1 trillion dollars in Cloud IT purchases by 2020, according to Gartner.

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Huawei’s Connect event kicked off earlier today – and the announcements flowed at a pace with its cloud offering front and centre of the majority of the news.

First off was the announcement of a partnership between the Chinese giant and Microsoft with Redmond’s apps being released on Huawei’s platform as part of an ‘in-depth cooperation on the public cloud.’

The two companies signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to seal the deal whereby more Microsoft enterprise-level products will be brought online.

“Huawei Cloud looks forward to cooperating with Microsoft to build an open and win-win ecosystem,” said Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei’s cloud BU and IT product line. “The signing of this MoU marks the start of strategic cooperation between the two companies.” Alain Crozier, CEO of Microsoft China, added: “Our increased collaboration will drive innovation as we build a seamless platform to benefit customers through industry-leading technology.”

Next up on the agenda – with the event theme as ‘grow with the cloud’ – was around assuring customers that Huawei has, and will continue to make, investments in the public cloud domain.

Huawei believes there will be five major global clouds – and it wants a piece of the pie, with Guo Ping, Huawei rotating CEO, citing the Matthew effect – the idea of ‘the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer’ – as reason for keeping up with the Joneses.

“The cloud is a cornerstone of the intelligent world,” he told attendees. “Society is experiencing a tangible Matthew effect in digital technology development. Because of this, as well as economies of scale in investment, clouds around the world will begin to converge – becoming more and more centralised.

“In the future, we predict there will be five major clouds in the world,” Guo added. “Huawei will work with our partners to build one of those five clouds, and we’ve got the technology and know-how to do it.”

Alongside this was the debut of Huawei’s ‘innovative enterprise intelligence’ (EI) solution, which aims to beef up enterprise cloud deployments with a bit of AI. To put this more specifically, these include machine learning, deep learning and graph analysis platforms, API services such as visual and voice recognition, as well as scenarios specific to particular industries.

A real-life example of this in action – the EI today made its international debut – is around logistics. Through EI, Huawei can offer a logistics company the best containers for packing, as well as a 3D view of each container thus improving efficiency. Data analysis can be used to clear customs at the first hurdle, as well as improve warehouse space efficiency by up to 10%.

“The best cloud must be able to deliver the services that customers need, and AI needs to create more value for enterprises,” said Zheng. “We’re positioning Huawei Cloud as an enabler of the intelligent world. It provides AI, IoT, computing, and storage capabilities that provide enterprises with more innovative, intelligent cloud services.”

You can take a look at the full list of Huawei Connect announcements here.

Picture credit: «Huawei», by «Kārlis Dambrāns«, used under CC BY 2.0 / Modified from original