Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Ritesh Patel, founder and VP of Products and Marketing, Nirmata
Managing Applications for Tomorrow's Enterprises
Technology has changed everything, from how
customers interact with your brand to how employees work and how organizations
operate. Behind much of this advancement is the use of multi-cloud technology,
microservices, containers and DevOps within organizations. The increasingly
complex ecosystems, in-demand expertise and a growing list of competing priorities
are presenting IT with new challenges.
Enterprises
are beginning to strategize which workloads fit best in the cloud, and how to
manage multiple workloads across various cloud environments, while maintaining
flexibility. The result is that IT organizations, and the CIOs that manage
them, are being stretched to understand their overall enterprise business
model, while being able to orchestrate the applications and supporting
infrastructure to where the data and services reside. Subsequently, as cloud continues
to mature, IT will no longer be viewed within the business as a cost center,
but as a potential service provider. Gartner predicts that through 2022,
a fast path to digital will be converting internal capabilities to external
revenue-generating products using cloud economics and flexibility. In 2019, top enterprise performers will seek out
opportunities to market their unique capabilities and shift IT to a
revenue-generating part of the organization.
To prepare for the changes ahead, IT will need
to begin evaluating their decision-making framework to a model that positions
the team to continuously manage applications across the enterprise, whether
it's the of
use containers to move data between private and public clouds, or the ability to run Kubernetes to help
orchestrate cloud environments, and the capability to
manage traditional, serverless, microservices applications.
CIOs called to balance risk vs. manage business expectations
The first step in creating an effective
application management process is for CIOs to understand the types of risk that
their organization faces, including those that threaten customer relationships.
Companies like Uber and Amazon rely on real-time data services and the next
opportunity for CIOs is to manage these real-time apps and identify potential
risk events. By 2025, IDC projects that 163
zettabytes of data will be created each year, and 25 percent of that data will
be real-time in nature. That massive data that will have to traverse networks
and be made available to apps instantaneously, creating an opportunity to
manage technology that meets the business expectations of high customer demands
while staying nimble to competitors, and addressing pressure on profits.
IT investments aligned with business goals
In the next year, the way in which
applications are built and designed will change significantly. We will continue
to move away from monolithic applications into a world built on microservices,
which will allow businesses to take advantage of a hybrid, distributed workload
that is being load-balanced across both public and private platforms. These
microservices allow for businesses to code themselves off large legacy
platforms and move towards more agile environments. To get there, IT will have
the autonomy to invest in cloud services but they will need to direct their
spending in the context of the business objectives, versus through the lens of
providing a functionality.
As the transformation to digital continues,
the ability of enterprises to streamline and improve application management and
digital experiences by removing the friction with customers is the next
frontier. In the enterprise, friction has appeared as fragmented customer
profiles, department silos, inefficient workflows, slow feature deployment,
redundant processes and anything that gets in the way of slow customer
experience. Enterprises will need a flexible platform to help manage their
applications, which is their frontline experience with customers. Removing the
friction with the help of a flexible enterprise-grade platform will help IT
move into the service provider role, and away from being seen as just a cost
center.
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About the Author
Ritesh Patel is co-founder of Nirmata and Vice President
of Products and Marketing. He has 20+ years of experience building and
delivering enterprise software solutions and has led highly successful software
and business development teams. Ritesh began his career in engineering for high
tech firms and has since migrated to the business side of the operation. Prior
to Nirmata, Ritesh led business development at Brocade, where he was
responsible for defining the firm's cloud strategy and oversaw developments
that advanced the entire cloud "as-a-service" market. Ritesh has also held key
technical positions at Trapeze Networks (where he created industry
award-winning products), Nortel, and Motorola. Ritesh holds an MBA from UC
Berkeley and a master's degree in computer engineering from Michigan State
University.