Getting Hybrid IT Right
By Charles Araujo, Intellyx Principal Analyst
We define Hybrid IT as a management approach in which organizations create a
workload-centric and value-driven integrated technology stack that may
include legacy infrastructure, web-scale architectures, private cloud
implementations along with public cloud platforms ranging from
Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Software-as-a-Service.
At Intellyx, we have a mantra that goes something like this: "We love
confusion in the market. It gives us something to write about."
Well, if confusion is what we like, Hybrid IT delivers it in spades.
The tech industry is a buzzword-creating machine, but the truth is that all
of these buzzwords serve a purpose. As an industry, we are in a constant
struggle to distill, comprehend and communicate new and complex ideas that
are arising at a dizzying pace. So the industry ... (more)
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I was at a conference recently when I saw it. I sighed and shook my head.
A development manager from a large enterprise organization was explaining how
they had created a DevOps maturity model based on CMMI. They went on to
describe their current state of maturity and their plans to get to ‘full
maturity' in the next three years. He continued by explaining how they had
presented this plan to executive management and subsequently received
approval for a new ‘DevOps team.'
Many organizations are now looking to DevOps maturity models to gauge their
DevOps adoption and compare their maturity to their peers. However, as
enterprise organizations rush to adopt DevOps, moving past experimentation to
embrace it at scale, they are in danger of falling into the trap that they
have fallen into time and time again.
Unfortun... (more)
As today's digital disruptions bounce and smash their way through
conventional technologies and conventional wisdom alike, predicting their
path is a multifaceted challenge. So many areas of technology advance on
Moore's Law-like exponential curves that divining the future is fraught with
danger.
Such is the problem with artificial intelligence (AI) and its related
concepts, including cognitive computing, machine learning, and deep learning.
Today we have interesting but hardly revolutionary technologies like Apple
Siri and Amazon Alexa. And tomorrow? If you listen to the doomsayers, The
Terminator's Skynet or its killer robot kin will take over the world from us
puny humans.
While we cannot entirely disagree with the dire warnings of certain pundits,
the reality is that there is quite a lot of territory to cover between Siri
and Skynet. Even well before some kind... (more)
Preparing for the Next Disruption
By Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
I'll never forget the day that I first encountered the Internet. It was 1989
when a friend who worked in aerospace showed it to me - and I immediately
ignored it.
I wasn't alone. Almost everyone missed the true impact it would have on the
world. I originally told this story in my first book, The Quantum Age of IT:
Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change and went on to explain
how this encounter had precipitated the three market forces that had changed
everything.
These three market forces were:
The consumerization of IT - how consumer technologies changed the
expectations and perceptions of technology consumers The criticality of IT -
how technology moved from a back-office focus to powering every business
process, every customer interaction and virtually every element of the ... (more)
Digital Transformation: It's the Customer, Stupid!
By Charles Araujo, Intellyx Principal Analyst
If you cannot explicitly articulate how investing in a new technology,
changing the approach or re-engineering the business process will help you
achieve your customer-centric vision of the future in direct and measurable
ways, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
At Intellyx, we spend a lot of time talking to technology vendors. In our
conversations, we explore emerging new technologies that are either
disrupting the way enterprise organizations work or that help enable those
organizations to cope with disruption.
The rate at which new companies and new technologies are emerging is
staggering, and it can be difficult to keep up - even for those of us whose
sole job is to do so. It's no wonder, therefore, that so many people draw a
straight line between the concept of digi... (more)
A completely new computing platform is on the horizon. They're called
Microservers by some, ARM Servers by others, and sometimes even ARM-based
Servers. No matter what you call them, Microservers will have a huge impact
on the data center and on server computing in general.
What Is a Microserver...and What Isn't
Although few people are familiar with Microservers today, their impact will
be felt very soon. This is a new category of computing platform that is
available today and is predicted to have triple-digit growth rates for some
years to come - growing to over 20% of the server market by 2016 according to
Oppenheimer ("Cloudy With A Chance of ARM" Oppenheimer Equity Research
Industry Report).
According to Chris Piedmonte, CEO of Suvola Corporation - a software and
services company focused on creating preconfigured and scalable Microserver
appliances for deployin... (more)
In the No-Code corner are the ‘citizen developers' - business users who can
build functional but generally limited apps without having to write a line of
code. The Low-Code corner, in contrast, centers on professional developers,
streamlining and simplifying their work - delivering enterprise-class
applications with little or no hand-coding.
At Intellyx we gravitate toward disruption, and the burgeoning
Low-Code/No-Code space has sucked us in like a black hole.
We've spoken with numerous vendors in this multifaceted market, and we work
with several of them - and yet, every one has a different value proposition.
The big analyst firms can't make heads or tails of this mess. Gartner has
concocted the High-Productivity Application Platform-as-a-Service mouthful,
or what hapless vendors call HPaPaaS - as though anyone would want to buy the
low-productivity alternative.
F... (more)
We've seen many buzzwordy innovations in technology over the last decade,
from cloud computing to big data to microservices and beyond - but artificial
intelligence (AI) by far has the most buzzword baggage.
On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations
since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it
continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves.
We didn't suffer this kind of PR nightmare with the cloud, or the web, or
even client/server. In fact, AI has an unprecedented set of PR challenges
that threaten to sink the entire movement.
AI vendors, from the burgeoning gaggle of AI startups all the way to IBM, are
all crowded together at the eye of this hurricane. However, this PR storm
impacts enterprises as well, as AI promises to change the role technology
plays for every industry on this planet... (more)
Digital transformation. Digital strategy. Digital leadership. Digital
enterprise. Digital customer journey.
It seems the list of things that have gone digital is unending and remarkably
broad.
Underlying all of these intertwined digital concepts? Unquestionably, some
kind of technology.
Digital technology.
Just one problem: nobody agrees on just what constitutes digital technology.
And without a grasp on what technologies are digital - or more to the point,
what technologies are not digital - we've built our entire digital edifice on
a foundation of sand.
Ones and Zeroes
We can all agree that the broadest definition of digital technology would be
technology that uses ones and zeroes to represent data. After all, bits - aka
binary digits - are where we got the word digital in the first place.
Using this definition, digital technology launched on Valentine's Day in ... (more)
The Deconstruction of Digital Transformation
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
The complex idea behind the term digital transformation is that technology
has created a fundamental shift in how organizations operate. The
consumerization of technology - and the customer empowerment it created - has
upended the traditional operating paradigm of organizations moving it away
from a capital and process-centric model to a customer-centric one.
The need to digitally transform your organization is now - or at least should
be - a strategic imperative. The fact, however, that the term digital
transformation is now a bona fide buzzword has obfuscated its importance.
The problem is that we create buzzwords because we need a simple, shorthand
way of communicating what is otherwise a complex idea. In the process,
however, the deeper, underlying complexity of the... (more)
Intellyx's 2017 Digital Transformation Predictions
Guest post by Intellyx Principal Analyst Charles Araujo
Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year.
And many would say, not a moment too soon. With a series of tumultuous
elections around the world and an unusual number of celebrity passings, it's
been a rough year.
But there is at least one bright spot from 2016: Intellyx's digital
transformation prognostications were close to spot on!
As is our tradition, each year we review last year's predictions and make all
new fresh ones! This year, it is my turn to review Jason's 2016 predictions
and let you know what I see happening in the coming year.
A Look Back on a Year of Inflection Points
Our predictions for 2016 centered on one thing: inflection points.
We predicted that blockchain, IoT security and open source web scale
technology would all turn the corner... (more)
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