2018 marked some significant announcements and changes to the Hybrid Cloud Landscape driven by the sticker shock of rising costs of Hybrid Cloud. Enterprises quickly realized that the current tools lacked the visibility and control not only in what workloads were where but how much the brave new Hybrid Cloud world actually was costing. Validation of the need for Business Technology Management around Hybrid cloud came from both Federal and Private Sectors. First, the US Government made getting a handle on command and control of assets a key initiative for 2018 on www.cio.gov. Second, the Private Equity community reacted with their purchase of Apptio for nearly $2 Billion.
Lack of Visibility No Longer Acceptable
Cost of Hybrid Cloud was raised as a major issue dating back to 2014 with little in the way of viable solutions across the stack. The lack of progress over the last 5 years has fueled demand and visibility for change. The C-Suite will no longer accept the lack of visibility and control over costs not only in Hybrid Cloud but across the IT Stack that has plagued Digital Transformation Initiatives ability to succeed. As a result, management firms and vendors across the stack will look to tuck in tools that combine artificial intelligence, cost calculators, and visibility to lift and shit workloads. Unfortunately, many of the existing solutions around migration, analyzing, lifting and shifting workloads lack the capabilities and in some cases require architecture forklifts to work.
Greater Focus on Business Results & Customers
2019 will see a greater focus and shift to finally addressing some of the critical components of Business Service Management that were cut such as the Business Templates and Views. A whole new generation of As A Service or XXOps tools will emerge to supplant, tuck in or replace existing solutions for Service Management and Business Technology Management tools. Compliance and visibility to maintain compliance to security, business, and regulatory directives across the globe will continue to be top of mind for the C Suite throughout 2019.
Artificial Intelligence Continues to Drive New Solutions
The race for enhancing current operations solutions with Artificial Intelligence will continue through 2019 and beyond. The failure of many new Digital Transformation initiatives has top executives across business and technology looking for new ways to enhance visibility, maintain control, predict and pivot planning to fit the market changes. The race to AI is still nascent and will take awhile for vendors to figure out nuances needed for success.
AWS Ripple Effect
The recent announcement of AWS Outpost will cause a ripple affect on purchasing as the media continues to hype up the venture between VMware and Amazon. Unlike other announcements in this area – the Amazon AWS announcement will have Business and IT leaders alike taking a pause to investigate possibilities of the new solution. The key question is whether Enterprise customers are ready to leap or able to accept relinquishing control and vendor lock in for their cloud environment. There will be a ripple in the industry to consolidate and provide solutions from other tools too compete in this area.
