Finally, a Culmination of IT Management Prowess

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Finally, a Culmination of
IT Management Prowess
Transcript of a discussion on how new maturity in management over all facets of IT amounts to a
culmination of 30 years of IT operations improvement and ushers in an era of comprehensive
automation, orchestration, and AIOps.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Analyst podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on successful digital transformation.
This hybrid IT strategies interview explores how new maturity in the management and
composition of multiple facets of IT -- from cloud to bare-metal, from serverless to legacy
systems -- amount to a culmination of 30 years of IT evolution.
We’ll hear now from an IT industry analyst about why – for perhaps the first time -- we’re
able to gain an uber-view over all of IT operations. And we’ll explore how increased
automation over complexity such as hybrid and multicloud deployments sets the stage
for artificial intelligence (AI) in IT operations, or AIOps.
It may mean finally mastering IT heterogeneity and giving businesses the means to truly
manage how they govern and sustain all of their digital business assets.
Here to help us define the new state of total IT
management is Martin Hingley, President and Market
Analyst at ITCandor Limited, based in Oxford, UK.
Welcome, Martin.
Martin Hingley: Hi, Dana.
Gardner: Looking back at IT operations, it seems that
we have added a lot of disparate and hard-to-manage
systems – separately and in combination -- over the
past 30 years. Now, with infrastructure delivered as
services and via hybrid deployment models, we might
need to actually conquer the IT heterogeneity
complexity beast – or at least master it, if not
completely slay it.
Do you agree that we’re entering a new era in the evolution of IT operations and
approaching the need to solve management comprehensively, over all of IT?
Hingley

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More change, yet more of the same
Hingley: I have been an IT industry analyst for 35 years, and it’s always been the
same. Each generation of systems comes in and takes over from the last, which has
always left operators with the problem of trying to manage the new with the old.
A big shift was the client/server model in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the influx
of PC servers and the wonderful joy of having all these new systems. The problem was
that you couldn’t manage them under the same regime. And we have seen a continuous
development of that problem over time.
It’s also a different problem depending on the size of organization. Small- to medium-
sized (SMB) companies can at least get by with bundled systems that work fine and use
Microsoft operating systems. But the larger organizations generate a huge mixture of
resources.
Cloud hasn’t helped. Cloud is very different from your internal IT stuff -- the way you
program it, the way you develop applications. It has a wonderful cost proposition; at least
initially. It has a scalability proposition. But now, of course, these companies have to
deal with all of this [heterogeneity].
Now, it would be wonderful if we get to a place where we can look at all of these
resources. A starting point is to think about things as a service catalog, at the center of
your corporate apps. And people are beginning that as a theory, even if it doesn’t sit in
everybody’s brain.
How to Remove Complexity
From Multi-cloud
And Hybrid IT
So, you start to be able to compose all of this stuff. I like what Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE) is doing [with composable infrastructure]. … We are now getting to the
point where you can do it, if you are clever. Some people will, but it’s a difficult, complex
subject.
Gardner: The idea of everything-as-a-service gives you the opportunity to bring in new
tools. Because organizations are trying to transform themselves digitally -- and the cloud
has forced them to think about operations and development in tandem -- they must
identify the most efficient mix of cloud and on-premises deployments.
They also have to adjust to a lack of skills by automating and trying to boil out the
complexity. So, as you say, it’s difficult.

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But if 25 percent of companies master this, doesn’t that put them in a position of being
dominant? Don’t they gain an advantage over the people who don’t?
Hingley: Yes, but my warning from history is this. With mainframes, we thought we had
it all sorted out. We didn’t. We soon had client/server, and then mini-computers with
those UNIX systems, all with their own virtualizations and all that wonderful stuff. You
could isolate the data in one partition from application data from a different application.
We had all of that, and then along comes the x86 server.
It’s an architectural issue rather than a technology issue. Now we have cloud, which is
very different from the on-premises stuff. My warning is let’s not try and lock things down
with technology. Let’s think about it as architecture. If we can do that, maybe we can
accommodate neuromorphic and photonic and quantum computing within this regime in
the future. Remember, the people who really thought they had it worked out in previous
generations found out that they really hadn’t. Things moved on.
Gardner: And these technology and architectural transitions have occurred more
frequently and accelerated in impact, right?
Beyond the cloud, IT is life
Hingley: I have been thinking about this quite a lot. It’s a weird thing to say, but I don’t
think “cloud” is a good name anymore. I mean, if you are a software company, you’d be
an idiot if you didn’t make your products available as a service.
Every company in the world uses the cloud at some level. Basically there is no longer
choice about whether we use a cloud. All those companies that thought they didn’t,
when people actually looked, found they were using the cloud a lot in different
departments across the organization. So it’s a challenge, yet things constantly change.
If you look 20 years in the future, every single
physical device we use will have some level of
compute built into it. I don’t think people like you
and I are going to be paid lots of money for
talking about IT as if it were a separate issue.
It is the world economy, it just is; so, it becomes
about how well you manage everything together.
As this evolves, there will be genuinely new things … to manage this. It is possible to
manage your resources in a coherent way, and to sit over the top of the heterogeneous
resources and to manage them.
Gardner: A tandem trend to composability is that more-and-more data becomes
available. At the edge, smart homes, smart cities, and also smarter data centers. So,
we’re talking about data from every device in the data center through the network to the
20 years in the future, every
single physical device we use
will have some level of
compute built into it. … It is the
world economy … so, it
becomes about how well you
manage everything together.

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end devices, and back again. We can even determine how the users consume the
services better and better.
We have a plethora of IT ops data that we’re only starting to mine for improving how IT
manages itself. And as we gain a better trail of all of that data, we can apply machine
learning (ML) capabilities, to see the trends, optimize, and become more intelligent
about automation. Perhaps we let the machines run the machines. At least that’s the
vision.
Do you think that this data capability has pushed us to a new point of manageability?
Data’s exploding, now what?
Hingley: A jetliner flying across the Atlantic creates 5TB of data; each one. And how
many fly across the Atlantic every day? Basically you need techniques to pick out the
valuable bits of data, and you can’t do it with people. You have to use AI and ML.
The other side is, of course, that data can be dangerous. We see with the European
Union (EU) passing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), saying it’s a
citizens’ right within the EU to have privacy protected and data associated with them
protected. So, we have all sorts of interesting things going on.
The data is exploding. People aren’t filtering it properly. And then we have potential
things like autonomous cars, which are going to create massive amounts of data. Think
about the security implications, somebody hacking into your system while you are doing
70 miles an hour on a motorway.
I always use the parable of the seeds. Remember that some seeds fall on fallow ground,
some fall in the middle of the field. For me, data is like that. You need to work out which
bits of it you need to use, you need to filter it in order to get some reasonable stuff out of
it, and then you need to make sure that whatever you are doing is legal. I mean, it’s got
to be fun.
From Multi-cloud
And Hybrid IT
Gardner: If businesses are tasked with this massive and growing data management
problem, it seems to me they ought to get their IT house in order. That means across a
vast heterogeneity of systems, deployments, and data types. That should happen in
order to master the data equation for your lines of business applications and services.
How important is it then for AIOps -- applying AI principles to the operations of your data
centers – to emerge sooner rather than later?

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You can handle the truth
Hingley: You have to do it. If you look at GDPR or Sarbanes-Oxley before that, the
challenge is that you need a single version of the truth. Lots of IT organizations don’t
have a single version of the truth.
If they are subpoenaed to supply every email
that it has the word “Monte Carlo” in it, they
couldn’t do it. There are probably 25 copies of all
the emails. There’s no way of organizing it. So
data governance is hugely important, it’s not nice
to have, it’s essential to have. Under new regulations coming, and it’s not just EU, GDPR
is being adopted in lots of countries.
It’s essential to get your own house in order. And there’s so much data in your
organization that you are going to have to use AI and ML to be able to manage it. And it
has to go into IT Ops. I don’t think it’s a choice, I don’t think many people are there yet. I
think it’s nonetheless a must do.
Gardner: We’ve heard recently from HPE about the concept of a Composable Cloud,
and that includes elevating software-defined networking (SDN) to a manageability
benefit. This helps create a common approach to the deployment of cloud, multi-cloud,
and hybrid-cloud.
Is this the right direction to go? Should companies be thinking about a common
denominator to help sort through the complexity and build a single, comprehensive
approach to management of this vast heterogeneity?
Hingley: I like what HPE is doing, in particular the mixing of the different resources. You
also have the HPE GreenLake model underneath, so you can pay for only what you use.
By the way, I have been an analyst for 35 years, if every time the industry started talking
about the need to move from CAPEX to OPEX had actually shifted, we would have been
at 200 percent OPEX by now.
In the bad times, we move toward OPEX. In the good times, we secretly creep back
toward CAPEX because it has financial advantages. You have to be able to mix all of
these together, as HPE is doing.
From Multi-cloud
And Hybrid IT
Moreover, in terms of the architecture, the network fabric approach, the software-
defined approach, the API connections, these are essential to move forward. You have
Data governance is hugely
important, it’s not nice to have,
it’s essential to have.

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to get beyond point products. I hope that HPE -- and maybe couple of other vendors --
will propose something that’s very useful and that helps people sort this new world out.
Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it here. We have been exploring how new
levels of maturity and composability have the opportunity to attain a culmination of 30
years of pan-IT management evolution. And we have learned how gaining an uber-view
of IT might finally lead to automation and optimization across multi-cloud, hybrid cloud,
and legacy IT assets as well.
So, please join me in thanking our guest, Martin Hingley, President and Market Analyst
at ITCandor Limited in Oxford, UK. Thank you, sir.
Hingley: No problem, thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst hybrid IT management strategies interview. I’m
Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series
of Hewlett Packard Enterprise sponsored discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community and do come
back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how new maturity in management over all facets of IT amounts to a
culmination of 30 years of IT operations improvement and ushers in an era of comprehensive
automation, orchestration, and AIOps. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights
reserved.
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Finally, a Culmination of IT Management Prowess