By Brian Wilson of Zenoss

AI and Other Trends Impacting Infrastructure Monitoring

2019 saw many major strides in AI adoption, particularly in the IT Ops arena, that were fueled by the need to tackle challenges around drawing meaningful insights from large sets of raw infrastructure data. Most IT projects involving AI invariably end up doing data manipulation or aggregation by setting up models of data ingestion - typically, without thinking about the business needs first. Looking ahead to 2020, IT leaders and CIOs will spend more time assessing the real value of their AI bets.

We will start to look at more outcomes from enterprise AI investments as they begin to merge into the IT fabric. With the accessibility to algorithms and natively clean datasets, the potential to realize maximum value from AI will be huge. And with supporting infrastructure to manage effective deployments and integrated machine learning along with a big data ecosystem, we will see more AI-based decision making this year.

We will see major cloud marketplaces beginning to emerge as the B2B IT resellers of the future. As legacy on-premises software is replaced by cloud alternatives, the potential for software purchases to shift from software resellers to cloud marketplaces is evident. Traditional IT resellers might be viewed just as a means of procurement for cloud services. This trend has urged many software resellers to pivot to roles as managed service providers to sustain their businesses.

Given the DevOps disruption over the last few years, performance monitoring of the entire IT stack has become more complex with the use of microservices scattered across the infrastructure. Agile DevOps methodology and its adoption helped CIOs deliver results in a timely manner. The increase in the speed to market for products being developed and the means of applying DevOps to innovate and provide scalability with improved resilience will dominate the list of priorities for CIOs this year. We will see developer buying habits being recognized as precursors to enterprise buyers for many organizations.

Today, buyers think "cloud-first" across most industry segments. The cloud-first approach holds a clear advantage in terms of scalability and lower capital expenditure. Even though digital transformation dominated key business strategy over recent years, we will begin to see most organizations going cloud-first to remain focused on the aspects of their business that let them differentiate, enabling them to seize new market opportunities, retain customers, and fuel business growth.

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About the Author

Brian Wilson brings more than 25 years of customer success leadership supporting clients across enterprise verticals, service providers and the federal government. Brian joined Zenoss in 2011 as vice president of services and support, was promoted to senior vice president of customer success in 2013, and then to chief customer officer in 2017. Today, Brian manages post-sales operations, product management and marketing for Zenoss.

Prior to joining Zenoss, Brian had worldwide responsibility for services delivery of the virtualization product portfolio at Quest Software. Brian joined Quest through an acquisition where, as vice president of client services, he was instrumental in the development of the first private cloud platform for Global 2000 enterprise customers. Previously, Brian has served in senior management roles in emerging technology companies, global service providers and the defense industry. Brian holds a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's in industrial engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Brian has had bylines and been quoted in publications such as Bloomberg, Converge XYZ, Destination CRM, ITA, IT Best of Breed, National Defense, Network World and University Business.