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How your IT can help you deliver better business outcomes

History is littered with firms that failed to grasp the impact digitization would have on their business models. Just think of the many examples of well-known brands that have rapidly collapsed because they failed to understand how, and more importantly how fast, digital disruption was impacting their businesses. If you don’t believe me – look it up on your BlackBerry.

But these failures did not need to happen. Many firms have been able to unlock tremendous business value by capitalizing on and innovating with new digital technologies. Remember when Netflix used to mail you a DVD in a red envelope? Netflix was able to shift, and shift quickly, from a firm that mailed DVDs, to one that streams digital content. Why didn’t Blockbuster, who had tremendous brand value, see this shift happening as well, and embark on their own digital transformation? Just like countless industries before who could not read the signs – such as retailers too reliant on brick and mortar locations who failed to grasp the importance of e-commerce – they could not see what was right in front of them. Or perhaps they could see it but lacked the ability to embrace new opportunities. And there will be many more Blockbusters who fail to understand and adopt the advantages that digitization provides.

Trends in disruption

When Aaron Ward and Richard Sears & Curtis Roebuck began selling everything from watches to furniture across the US out of their catalogs, they were able to capitalize on a new technology at the time – the emergence in intercontinental rail.  While this new capability drove innovation in certain sectors of the economy, it did not impact every sector. But the difference today is that digital transformation is disrupting and reshaping every industry, creating new opportunities in the marketplace by making it possible to rapidly deliver new customer experiences, build new digital products and services, and optimize core business operations. Today, it is IT that is driving disruption in every industry. 

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When I speak to customers about their digital transformation challenges and what steps are needed to make IT more innovative and focused on business outcomes, I see many commonalities. These include the need to handle large volumes of data, become more agile and flexible, reduce costs, increase flexibility, and gain better insights from their data to make the right decisions faster to improve their business outcomes.

Our customers know that moving to the public cloud is a key piece of the transformation puzzle that offers many advantages but can be challenging due to complexities and overwhelming choice.

I often get asked if moving everything to the cloud will make things simpler. The answer of course is: it depends. Cloud is great for many types of workloads, but not for all. We have seen success even with large-scale, mission-critical, and security-sensitive workloads in public clouds. And of course, the agility and elasticity of public cloud heavily favors many new applications.   

That said, technical factors may weigh against public cloud – such as latency or the need for very high levels of memory. Access to data may also have an impact, as well as data sovereignty or other regulatory requirements. Often, organizational and operational maturity may favor keeping some workloads on premise. Ultimately, there are tradeoffs that need to be understood and addressed before determining where a workload should reside. Even the cost of migration and the need for re-platforming or refactoring work at the application tier may have an impact on your decisions.

The key is not to look at cloud as a silver bullet, but rather to look at cloud as a critical component of your IT eco system. This is because moving workloads to the cloud is a significant undertaking and, unless done properly, does not always deliver the benefits promised and can unnecessarily increase complexity. It is important to have a clear framework to understand the tradeoffs and make the right decisions.

Digital transformation is all about the right mix

In our experience, we have found that it is rarely a binary decision – all cloud or no cloud -- but rather a hybrid IT answer that is the often most effective approach to optimize speed, agility, flexibility and savings. 

In general, we need IT services that are operated in a simple manner and that aggregate away underlying complexity, regardless of on-prem or off-prem, in a cloud or on dedicated infrastructure. The right mix for your company entirely depends on your individual situation. Are you working in a fast moving market, or in a highly regulated industry or are you a government or public organization? What is your investment strategy and plan? How quickly do you need to proceed? What’s your workload situation?

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 These are critical components that need to be considered when developing and planning your IT strategy and you probably need a trusted advisor that takes you on the journey to hybrid IT.

Continuously adapting to changing market requirements

We all need to constantly evolve our respective businesses and adapt to change. As experts that advise evolving strategies for digital enterprises and utilizing hybrid IT we actually lead the change and constantly evolve our own capabilities in order to deliver them to clients.

That’s why we have fostered a culture of innovation, made strategic acquisitions, have matured aspects of our capabilities so our partners can offer them, and expanded other capabilities within our hybrid IT portfolio.

An example is the acquisition of Cloud Cruiser. Their offering provides the foundation and tooling expertise for consumption based models. From that we enhance with internally developed tools and IP, and have accelerated the pace with the launch of HPE GreenLake, providing a range of consumption-based solutions that are already changing the way clients operate.

On top of the recognized expertise we hold for on-premises modernization and solutions, we have gained enormous capabilities through the acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners (CTP), whose cloud computing experts have designed and implemented hundreds of the world’s most advanced cloud initiatives and are helping our customers on a daily basis to move to the cloud, innovate on the cloud and operate the cloud. The CTP team is now an integral part of HPE, starting to offer public cloud expertise to our customers around the globe.

And with the recent addition of RedPixie we are bringing in more cloud consulting, application development and migration services capabilities specialized in the Microsoft Azure environment to move workloads to public cloud and enable your digital innovations. RedPixie bring particular expertise for cloud adoption as it applies to distributed networks and therefore to the industries with prevalence in core and distributed edge IT.

While we feel that we are very well positioned to help you define your right mix strategy and manage the complexities, we know that change is continuing to happen at rapid speed.  

At HPE Pointnext we are ready for the future and are on this journey together with you so that you can get the best out of your IT to accelerate innovations and shape what’s next.

Join me in San Francisco

This week I am looking forward to the Red Hat Summit! In my keynote speech on Thursday morning at 8:30 am PST I will outline how we are building automated, code-able and consumable technologies and are collaborating with Red Hat to simplify IT operations.

Join us on booth #403.

Featured articles:


Parvesh Sethi
SVP & GM, HPE Pointnext Services
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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About the Author

Parvesh_Sethi

Senior Vice President and General Manager for Global Client Services, HPE Pointnext. Together with his team of experienced, multi-discipline IT experts and consultants, he is providing advisory, professional and operational services to help companies with their digital transformations through Hybrid IT and Intelligent Edge solutions.