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EDITOR’S QUESTION
DAVE FUNNELL,
MANAGER: CLOUD
PROVIDER, VMWARE
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usinesses are competing in a rapidly changing environment,
one that requires them to become more responsive and
innovative to customer demands. The tag line for the way
they need to respond is to go through a Digital Transformation, but
what does that mean? Simply put this is the integration of digital
technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how
they operate and the delivery of value to customers.
This obviously puts a lot pf pressure onto IT organisations to support
business as it looks to develop the application services to support
Digital Transformation.
Traditional applications operate in a structured manner and for the
past 20 years we have been living in an era where Systems of Record
were the dominant application type upon which businesses gained
competitive advantage.
We have moved into the era of Systems of Engagement, which are
less about records and more about the actual customers. These
application services assist business to engage and orchestrate the
customer journey, with interactions that are more personalised and
interactive across multiple touch points.
This is going to require the rapid development of new application
types, with IT having to accelerate the time to market for these
applications, with the additional complication of needing to allow
the business to be both agile and manage costs.
This is the main reason for the adoption of a cloud first strategy.
In the cloud, the hyper-scalers are providing a platform for the
development of these application services in conjunction with
services accessed via the cloud provider, such as autoscaling, big data
and analytics engines.
Followed by Systems of Autonomy, which will combine these next
generation Cloud Native applications along with pre-existing Systems
of Record and the data held within.
This progression is going to pose a number of challenges for IT
organisations as the level of strain will increase exponentially as they
try to manage the varied application services and complexity of
integration points from these differing application types.
As the application service is the driver for business competitiveness it
is apparent we will evolve into a hybrid multi-cloud world. Why is this?
This can speed up the development of application services and allow
for functionality to be incorporated into the application that an
enterprise couldn’t develop internally. Developers will choose the platform for their application service with
the appropriate hyper-scaler, whether AWS, Azure or GCP, depending
upon the specific functionality required.
As these applications develop further, we will move into the era of
Systems of Intelligence, which incorporates Machine Learning and
Artificial Intelligence. This will lead to most enterprises consuming services from numerous
hyper-scalers, which in turn with require management by IT with a
consistent and secure operational platform. n
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