Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Mark Kirstein, VP Products, BitTitan
Live Documentation and Selective Automation
With the year coming to an end, all eyes are looking to 2018
to evaluate which technology and business trends will dominate. Here are three
projections for cloud and service providers in 2018:
Documentation Lives!
A maturing multi-cloud market will result in even greater
amounts of data and documentation for service providers, as well as an increase
in technical customer service requests. Consequently, standard operating
procedures (SOPs) and change management capabilities will become
mission-critical for ensuring teams operate efficiently and service delivery remains
consistent. Unorganized or inconsistent internal processes will derail service
provisioning and decrease overall efficiencies, as engineers create personal
best practices that remain decentralized and siloed from other departments.
Multi-cloud strategies are complex and have significantly
more components, including different cloud providers, migration requirements,
and even contract management across offerings. The advantage for implementing
multi-cloud initiatives is critical, as strategic adoption equips businesses with
increased bargaining power and risk mitigation. The ability to standardize and
centralize IT documentation will be a key differentiator for success in 2018.
Don't be fooled by high price tags - documentation
standardization is cheap, with a few vendors even offering it for free. The
most successful businesses will centralize their IT documentation for ease of
use and consistent, repeatable service delivery, while also building a
foundation for automation.
Automation Naysayers Get Left Behind...
This year saw significant advancements in the field of
automation (see backflipping Boston Dynamics' robot, autonomous
vehicles debuting
on public roads, or voice-ordered
Domino's pizza via Amazon's Alexa). Looking past these headline-grabbing
stories, 2017 also saw cloud and service providers begin to tap automation to
increase productivity, improve resource allocation, and scale their organizations.
In 2018, service providers that continue to ignore
automation will quickly find themselves losing ground to competitors. Look for
savvy CIOs and IT leaders to identify low-skill, time-intensive tasks that can
be automated, freeing up team resources to tackle more technical or
business-critical objectives that drive better outcomes for customers. Businesses
that fail to realize automation's potential will begin to lose customers, with
Gartner estimating a 25% drop in customer retention by the end of 2019 for companies
that continue to ignore automation.
...While Adopters See Margins, Business Improve
Automation represents a major opportunity for service
providers to maintain their margins on services. For a plethora of reasons -
from increased efficiency to team optimization and risk mitigation - automation
has the potential to positively affect businesses' bottom lines, while enabling
valuable team members to tackle additional tasks. When it's not saving
businesses money, it's making them money. As service providers continue to push
towards recurring revenue models with ongoing managed services instead of
one-off projects, look for selective automation to be a key part of the strategy.
In addition, automation empowers talented engineers and IT
teams to take on more projects, capitalizing on opportunity costs and enabling
organizations to scale their business. In short, business growth is reliant on
technology rather than people. In 2018, businesses will be able to do more with
less.
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About the Author
Mark Kirstein is Vice
President, Products at BitTitan, the
leader in Managed Services Automation, where he heads up product management,
data science, user experience, and knowledge management teams. Mark has over
two decades of experience overseeing product strategy, development, and
go-to-market initiatives for brands including Zebra Technologies, Motorola
Solutions, and Atenna Software.