By Ron Irvine, Worldwide Portfolio Director, Adaptive Management Services, HPE Pointnext, HPE Pointnext
We’re hearing a lot these days about how CIOs are becoming more strategic partners with executive management – how IT is moving closer to the core of the business and earning a seat at the table in strategy discussions. I’m a bit skeptical that it’s happening on anything like a broad scale. It’s certainly true that there’s an awareness that IT is “mission critical,” that you absolutely cannot afford to have the network go down even for a second, or a security slip-up that results in losing hundreds of thousands of credit card records. Those are hugely important discussions, but they’re not seen as directly related to business outcomes. Many in the C-Suite still see at least a percentage of IT expenditures as almost like a tax on the business. When IT leaders get into investment conversations, their colleagues are often about as excited as the rest of us are when it’s time to pay our personal income tax bill.
CIOs, for their part, know that new IT models and technologies are unveiling lots of potentially game-changing opportunities for the business. But they’re too mired in the day-to-day running of IT to implement them. Their hands are tied by escalating operational demands around managing the infrastructure, increasingly complex workloads and applications, and the relentless expansion of the IT estate into cloud and IoT. Here’s what I’m hearing in my conversations with IT leaders:
“I need help to run my infrastructure more efficiently. I want to take my finite IT resources and reallocate them so that they’re more aligned to business outcomes and crucial revenue discussions within the executive ecosystem. Can we do that while running our systems as well as, or better than, we’re doing it now – for the same cost? Or, preferably, less cost?
“Help me run complex workloads and applications. I have this new application that the business absolutely sees as having a strong and direct correlation to a business outcome. But it’s too new, too big, too complex for me to run effectively as a mission-critical piece of the datacenter. I don't have the right depth of skills on my bench today, and I don't necessarily see a path to having those skills in the future. I need some guidance and support to run this important individual element of my estate.”
“I need a partner to help me run the full breadth of my IT estate, from core to cloud to edge. It’s all about the sprawl. I've got workloads that sit in traditional data centers, and others that we’ve migrated to the cloud. I've got IoT use cases emerging, and intelligent edge devices out at the branches and on the factory floor. But I don’t have the bandwidth or the automation to be able to look across the entire ecosystem and say with certainty to the business, ‘this element is sitting at this location for the following strategic reasons,’ or ‘we should move this workload to a different location to better enable our business strategy.’ So I find myself becoming more and more reactive and less strategic as the complexity of the environment continues to grow.”
Support across the continuum of complexity
Companies vary, of course, in the kind of help they’re looking for. Some are in the early stages of digital transformation, perhaps working towards gaining a toehold in the cloud. Others have the transformation experience well in hand, but they’re finding that their multi-cloud, hybrid, core-to-edge environment is just getting too complicated to manage, and new deployments are taking too long.
Whatever your needs or stage in the transformation journey, HPE Pointnext Services has you covered. With HPE Adaptive Management Services, we partner with you to run any IT setup, from the simplest to the most complex. We monitor, operate and administer your assets, and we provide practical insights to help you evolve your infrastructure as business objectives change – see the image below.
HPE Adaptive Management Services comprises three elements:
- The platform. The HPE Adaptive Management Services platform combines tried-and-true HPE solutions, like our infrastructure management solution HPE OneView, with best-of-breed monitoring and configuration tools. It’s a unified management layer that delivers the tools, training, and staffing you need when you need them, saving you both budget and time. In addition to reducing management complexity, the platform helps you drive down human error and improve compliance.
An important feature of the platform is its AI engine, which delivers proactive insights to reduce unplanned downtime. It identifies trends and anomalies in your environment that would typically be missed by even the most skilled human monitoring. In addition, it offers you meaningful data on what’s working well and what could be working better, whether it’s the underlying infrastructure, a specific workload, or the entire environment from cloud to core to edge. It supports business-aligned decisions on what IT assets should go where, and why, enabling you to get the most from your infrastructure and push new applications out to the market faster and smarter.
- The process. The value of the platform-generated insights is hugely amplified when you have the right processes in place to respond quickly and appropriately. If the platform generates an alert, for example, you want to be sure that you can fix the issue without creating incremental problems like exposing a new security risk surface or inadvertently taking down a network switch.
The HPE Adaptive Management Services process, built on proven ITSM methodologies and HPE best practices, ensures predictable real-time responses to monitoring alerts, as well as continuous improvement based on intelligent insights delivered via the platform. We work with you to tailor the process to your environments, from specific workloads to the interdependencies across your entire IT estate. Our 200-plus standard operating procedures ensure that you’re always in control.
- The people. HPE Adaptive Management Services assigns a dedicated relationship manager to your business, backed by HPE’s certified experts in a vast range of market-leading infrastructures and applications. We build an in-depth understanding of your technical and operational environment across the full stack to deliver an exceptional management and support experience.
Our people have the deep experience to suggest proactive improvements, based on insights from the platform: “Hey, we noticed that performance on this application is starting to degrade. You've just brought on 5,000 new end-users in Bulgaria, and the app is sitting in a data center in Singapore. So how about if we replicate an instance of that application in your European data center? Or at a central European private cloud provider? Or on an intelligent edge device at the Bulgarian location? Your end-user experience would go way up.”
Evolution or revolution?
That’s just one hypothetical example of the kind of opportunity for improvement that constantly pops up in IT shops, but often goes unnoticed. It's not that anything is broken – it’s just not working as well as it could. HPE Adaptive Management Services takes an evolutionary approach to IT infrastructure management. Now, if you need revolutionary change, HPE can certainly do that too; our professional services organization would be glad to assist. But we think that for many organizations, the trusted partnership that HPE Adaptive Management Services provides is exactly the kind of help they’ve been looking for as they scope out a more strategic, innovative role for IT.
Want to talk to our experts? Come visit us at HPE Discover in Las Vegas and attend our session, Wednesday, June 19, 2019, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. for B8549: How to increase IT productivity and make IT easier. HPE Adaptive Management Services, partnering to deliver IT as a service
Or join us on the show floor for and check out the on floor demo, DEMO1203: Adaptive Management Services, Meet your business objectives faster with managed services tailored to your needs, from core to cloud to edge.
Related Resources:
Article by the same author: Less grunt work, more innovation: How IT can be a more strategic business partner
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