Plumbing - Not a Drawing-room topic, yet incredibly crucial

MUMBAI, INDIA: In his recent visit to India, Stephen Miles, VP, Service Assurance, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies captured the nuances of this market impressively. He observes Indian CIOs as the ones who are ultimately moving from buying to orchestrating IT along with maturity on people, other departments and ecosystems. He also sees CXO's role changing here and stresses on all facets of business to be embraced by IT so that it moves much beyond just a support function. 

In a brief interview, he shares some more light on what makes today's infrastructure strategy sharply distinct and strategic than what it was so far, and why the word 'plumber' is taking a new garb.

Is there any significant conflict while ensuring smooth IT uptime and at the same time managing issues around multiple vendor-choices, cost-constraints and architecture homogeneity?

Uptime of IT systems, applications and infrastructure is a given in today's connected world of complex, hybrid deployment models. Given the influx of a multitude of new technologies around cloud, mobility, social media, analytics etc. the number of vendor choices is also aplenty, from niche and agile point solution vendors to large framework-based vendors. This indeed poses a significant problem of architecture homogeneity across any large and complex IT system as more and more "Shadow IT" phenomenon creeps into distributed, large and complex IT organizations. However it is important to have a foundational management architecture stack spanning across all the IT subsystems ready to guarantee a smooth IT uptime in any large organization.

How can that be sorted out?

There may be short term gains to have in investing into niche technologies to solve a specific business problem. But with the dynamic nature of today's IT ecosystem, CIOs are extremely conscious in making sure that these technologies can architecturally fit into their overall long term IT strategy. Disruption indeed can bring in cost advantages, but long-term success depends largely on managing a balanced portfolio comprised of: mature, yet still agile and growing, technology stack with new and innovative solutions. We have seen that typically such disruptive investments, take into consideration not only current portfolio capabilities but also the company's vision as well as current and future partner ecosystem plans.

Does IT infrastructure management take different contours in an era where names like Dell, Oracle are experimenting with soup-to-nuts style full IT stacks?

In today's application economy, every company is a software company. According to a recent Gartner study "In 2014, CEOs must focus on leading their organizations to think like and become more like "tech" companies, because within a few years, digital business capabilities will dominate every industry". The study goes on and suggests that "Urgent action is needed because first-mover advantage is common in digital business, and fast followers must be very fast". There's no clear set path as to what is the guaranteed way of moving forward that ensures success. But typically monolithic companies with a lack of software focus will eventually fade away, unless they focus on business transforming software. We live in an interconnected application economy. We shop in an application economy. Our news, our entertainment, our banking, education, communications, everything is driven by a connected, mobile application-based world that probably sits in the palm of our hand. For organizations everywhere, this represents a significant opportunity, to develop applications and experiences that excite and engage their audiences and, in turn, open up a new market opportunity for their business that didn't exist previously.

Has Infrastructure management started being seen in a new light then?

Gartner predicts that, by 2017, buyers will shift about 50 per cent of their sourcing portfolio to managed services models that provide visibility into measurable cost savings and business profits. With the advent of this complex inter-connected application economy emerging, the Infrastructure Management has also evolved. Monitoring used to be like the "plumbing" of IT. For example, when you have someone over to your new home, you don't take them to see your plumbing. However, if something goes wrong with your plumbing, you know you will spend whatever it takes to fix the leak. You'll drop everything else that you are doing to head home if you hear about flooding from a burst pipe, leakage in your walls. The same applies to Infrastructure Management - ‘Incredibly' important, and often under appreciated.

 

So what can make it a less-unpleasant job?

Today organizations are keen to eliminate the complexity by having a single, unified platform that allows you to monitor and control your entire IT environment, both inside and outside the data center. There's immense focus on optimizing operational efficiency, eliminating the complexity, cost, and hassle of having to use and integrate multiple, disparate point management tools. Another key area of focus is to your team's productivity by reducing the time spent supporting management tools and allowing your resources more time to address the growing needs of the business. What makes us unique is our ability to monitor both on-premise datacenter technology and technology in private and public cloud environments with a unified view - for both inside and outside the data center. Increased efficiency and time to value is a critical element in today's dynamically changing IT systems and business challenges and hence organizations are giving more focus on the end-to-end business service, rather than the silos. It's about meeting tomorrow's needs - today.

Since we are talking of an application economy, what are your views on how APM (Application Performance Management) and DevOps are impacting IT and being impacted?

As to APM, some would say it is a little passé and with nothing new to talk about. But increasing dependencies on applications show a clear uptick in demand and significance of application management products. DevOps - Wow! It is interesting and important as a subject but I can't help but wonder if we really needed to create a new name here. It is something we have been trying to do for quite some time already. The trend may have crystallized the effect for sure and it heralds a new application economy. DevOps can bring quality-rich and quicker applications in operation-ready infrastructures. It fundamentally delivers objectives that CA deeply cares about, like - quality of service or lifecycle goals or simplified application acceleration. It is important to improve current infrastructure optimisation before accelerating or creating new applications.

India would be catching up here soon?

In India if you see the typical customer base, 90 per cent of Indian applications come from ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) or SIs (System Integrators). Customers, per se, rarely develop apps and they most of the time - operate. That's where the investment part comes in. That kind of dichotomy in India is very different and spells who buys what in a unique manner. We want to offer solutions that are good on both ‘develop' and ‘operate' side.

Does that put applications on a new graph?

I have been having some very interesting chats with the industry here. For example, talking to Telcos show the shift from cost-based management to proactive management, from mere infrastructure investments to quality of services, from applications to utilities. If you want those changes, then you need visibility and simplification of complex environments with ease of use and quality. Delivering that experience ubiquitously is what we are trying to achieve. It's not just about a back-end but about a cultural shift here.