With hardware-based thin client shipments in the region of 4–5 million units annually, this market is still a drop in the ocean compared to the 270 million PCs shipping each year, though the latter figure has been declining since 2011. And within the thin client market, Igel is in fourth place behind Dell and HP (each at around 1.2 million units annually) and China’s Centerm, which only sells into its home market.

However, the future for thin clients looks bright, in that the software-based segment of the market  (which some analyst houses refuse to acknowledge) is expanding, particularly for Igel. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology has stimulated this growth, but the greatest promise is probably in the embryonic DaaS market, whereby enterprises will have standard images for their workforce hosted by service providers.

In The Forrester Wave: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019, Forrester identified the 13 most significant IASM providers in the market today, with Zenoss ranked amongst them as a Leader.

“As complexity grows, I&O teams struggle to obtain full visibility into their environments and do troubleshooting. To meet rising customer expectations, operations leaders need new monitoring technologies that can provide a unified view of all components of a service, from application code to infrastructure.”

Who Should Read This

Enterprise organizations looking for a solution to provide:

• Strong root-cause analysis and remediation
• Digital customer experience measurement capabilities
• Ease of deployment across the customer’s whole environment, positioning themselves to successfully deliver intelligent application and service monitoring
  

Our Takeaways

Trends impacting the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team include:

• Operations leaders favor a unified view
• AI/machine learning adoption reaches 72% within the next 12 months
• Intelligent root-cause analysis soon to become table stakes
• Monitoring the digital customer experience becomes a priority
• Ease and speed of deployment are differentiators
  

Since the 2015 merger, various teams within the now combined Springer Nature IT department—such as the network, SysAdmin, and infrastructure teams—from different countries and with different backgrounds, methodologies, and vendors—had to collaborate and consolidate.

Springer Nature was already using SolarWinds® solutions upon Senior Systems Monitoring Analyst Dave Morris’s arrival at the company. He recalls, “It was a smaller SolarWinds environment then, and we’ve since grown it. After the merger, many other legacy products were very niche, and we couldn’t justify the cost of maintaining them as they were no longer suitable for the needs of the company and team. We decided to focus on SolarWinds, and because we utilize so many SolarWinds modules and we keep growing it as we go, the environment—and the benefit we receive from SolarWinds—continues to build.”

Though the Springer Nature IT infrastructure is now immense, it’s managed by a team of two: Morris and Software Engineer Consultant Liam Miller. Together, they comprise the global systems monitoring team for the entire Springer Nature business. As proponents for SolarWinds and in introducing SolarWinds products to the internal IT teams, it has been a process of building a team’s confidence in what the solutions could deliver as they get used to newer ways of working and scalability.

The author of this Pathfinder report is Mike Fratto, a Senior Research Analyst on the Applied Infrastructure & DevOps team at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Pathfinder reports navigate decision-makers through the issues surrounding a specific technology or business case, explore the business value of adoption, and recommend the range of considerations and concrete next steps in the decision-making process.

This report explores the following topics:

• the growth of already commonplace cloud usage for mission-critical applications
• the importance of cloud governance
• the top cloud security concerns for enterprises
• the adoption of third-party tools for cloud management
• the steps IT teams should take to make their cloud environments more secure and reliable

Vladimir Galabov, Director, Cloud and Data Center Research, and Rik Turner, Principal Analyst, Emerging Technologies, are the co-authors of this eBook from Omdia, a data, research, and consulting business that offers expert analysis and strategic insight to empower decision-making surrounding new technologies.

This eBook covers the following topics:

• the current landscape of cloud computing, including the BIG problems
• the advantages of using a multi-cloud approach
• the dangers of shadow IT, including billing surprises and security breaches
• the move of mission-critical applications to the cloud
• the considerations regarding cloud security, including recommendations for IT teams

Edge drivers and challenges

Sunlight.io, the edge infrastructure company, commissioned analyst firm Omdia to conduct a piece of research into the challenges of deploying applications at the edge. The report brings to the fore that while edge computing isn’t new in itself, recent digitisation and consumer demands mean enterprises are shifting to edge - driven by low latency, data gravity and data privacy requirements. But a lot is still undefined.

The paper explores:
●    Why defining the edge is not as easy as it sounds
●    What is driving this push to the edge?
●    The challenges of deploying the edge
●    Why the move to cloud-native is a new opportunity for HCI
●    Some final thoughts