IT Operations Leaders go Beyond Business as Usual @ Gartner IOSS
What a week! Our team spent 5 days in Orlando last week, representing BigPanda at both Gartner’s IT Operations Strategies and Solutions Summit and ServiceNow’s Knowledge17 conferences. Here’s our wrap up on Gartner IOSS.
Hundreds of enterprise IT leaders gathered in at the Hilton Orlando this past week to learn how IT can take advantage of new technologies and practices to deliver more value to the business. The show was packed with keynotes, analyst presentations and sponsor content that showcased lots of very interesting concepts. Many of these concepts are not new, and are finally gaining lots of momentum. Attendees learned they need to pay attention in order to stay relevant. Here are some important takeaways from the Gartner IOSS show:
1. IT to Business, not the other way around
Information Technology needs to support the business, not only by aligning, but also by taking part in the specific initiatives that move the company forward. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders should consider modern IT monitoring efforts with the business in mind,. The impact is more than the bits and bytes of the collected data from the infrastructure, and that should be valued up front. Gartner talked about how the transactions themselves are valuable to the business, not the hardware and infrastructure.
2. New Tech is here to stay
Get over it. Containers, IoT, Automation, Cloud, it’s all here to stay. And the adoption rates are increasing significantly. We must embrace that within IT organizations. Every organization large or small now requires multiple disparate and distributed technologies to operate. Gartner’s message was clear – get involved and work with your business stakeholders up front so you are not left behind.
The BigPanda squishy army at attention #GartnerIOM
3. Level Up
IT Operations skill sets today are not where the business needs them to be. In light of new technology and new business demands, operators will need both business and technical skill development to deliver what the business needs to succeed. Datacenters are disappearing, and being replaced with cloud environments with interconnected fabrics of micro services. Internet of Things enables business on the go, and IT has to deliver the services to support that. In a world where business can and will not wait, IT has the responsibility to innovate and deliver a high quality of service.
4. The name of the game is…Automation
Ever since the business has been making demands to IT, IT has been playing catch up. As Gartner noted at the summit, IT has struggled to create efficiency, accountability and predicability in IT processes and delivery. Automation can help, and many organizations have started to opportunistically deploy automation to improve how IT supports the business. But, this week, Gartner argued the I&O Leaders need to do more, and intentionally move from being opportunistic to systematic with regards to deploying automation. Several analysts discussed how I&O organizations can deliver better quality of service to the business while reducing costs, variability and risk.
Our Takeaway: BigPanda = Gartner’s vision for the modern IT
Gartner has been talking a lot about a bimodal world for some time.
Mode 1 focuses on transforming the legacy environment into something ready for the digital world.
Mode 2, on the other hand, explores the unknown, solving problems in agile fashion.
Gartner highlighted that as Mode 2 reinvents IT, automation will be key to driving efficiency and improving reliability.
Delivering business value, embracing new techniques and technologies, driving efficiency and leveraging automation, BigPanda is the ideal fit for IT Operations organizations. We’re committed to solving problems for the bimodal world, and building out automation within our platform to solve the problems that help businesses run effectively as the scale of IT data continues to expand.
All in all, Gartner IOSS was an amazing conference with great keynotes, amazing sessions, and phenomenal networking with IT folks from across the globe. We’re looking forward to another great one next year!
