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Author: Mike Vizard

HPE Leverages AI for Remote Server Management

The latest ProLiant MicroServer is designed to use AI to provide the next generation remote server management

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus platform designed to be managed remotely using advanced algorithms the company makes available via the cloud.

Tim Peters, vice president and general manager for global small-to-medium businesses and the midmarket at HPE, said the goal is to make it possible for organizations of all sizes to take advantage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to automate the management of servers in remote offices.

Based on Intel Pentium and Intel Xeon processors and weighing less than 10 pounds, the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus comes with HPE Integrated Lights Out 5 (iLO5) server management tool that enables IT teams to configure, monitor and update servers remotely. Those servers can then also be connected back HPE InfoSight for Servers, a cloud-based AI tool that HPE is making available for the first time on this class of servers, said Peters.

HPE is making this class of servers available as part of a subscription service option that makes the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus available starting at just less than $20 per month for organizations that prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. This latest generation of HPE servers also only generates 36dB of sound so most employees in a remote office may not even be aware of its existence.

In addition, Peters noted the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus server also supports HPE’s silicon-based root of trust technology, which prevents servers in remote offices from being tampered with when there is no IT staff available at that location.

The days when most organizations could afford to have IT staff at each remote office are all but over. IT organizations increasingly need to rely on frameworks that allow them to centrally manage IT infrastructure wherever it’s deployed. IT teams can either build and deploy those IT automation frameworks themselves or they can rely on the frameworks that IT vendors are embedding in their latest generation of systems. Naturally, that latter approach requires IT to replace their existing IT infrastructure. However, given the rate at which applications are being deployed and upgraded, many organizations are now finding they are replacing server infrastructure more frequently.

Regardless of the approach, overworked IT staffs don’t want to have to send someone to a remote office location unless it’s absolutely required. Beyond the cost of the travel, there’s the time that could be better spent on more pressing IT management tasks to consider.

Of course, anything involving AI is likely to make IT administrators nervous. However, as IT becomes more complex, it’s not likely IT teams will be replaced. Rather, the focus of IT teams will shift toward other areas that add more value to the business as more rote tasks increasingly are automated.

Naturally, it may be a while before all the legacy infrastructure installed is replaced, so IT teams may still need to travel to remote offices for some additional period of time. However, the days when IT teams racked up frequent flyer miles because of the need to visit remote office locations will soon be a distant memory.

— Mike Vizard

March 11, 2020
ServiceNow Embraces AI to Manage IT

ServiceNow has taken the wraps off the Orlando update to its cloud platform for managing IT that adds advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

In addition, an existing integration framework that enables the Now Platform from ServiceNow to manage DevOps pipelines created by third-party platforms is now part of the core platform. Previously, that capability was only available as an add-on that could be downloaded from the ServiceNow online store.

Pablo Stern, senior vice president of IT workflows for ServiceNow, said that as ITIL-based frameworks and DevOps continue to converge it is apparent IT teams will also need to rely more on AI to manage IT environments that are becoming increasingly more complex.

The Now Intelligence capabilities being embedded into the Now Platform will address that issue by surfacing insights and making recommendations to predict and resolve issues before they become a major problem, he said.

IT teams can also take advantage of “always-on virtual agents” to track and automatically initiate specific workflows.
Analytics capabilities provided by Now Intelligence also include recommendations on how to optimize usage of cloud assets based on the billing options available and the ability to asses risks to the business. That latter capability includes vulnerability assessments of software and hardware that can be used to automatically trigger a remediation process.

ServiceNow has also enhanced its support for mobile computing platforms and added Agent Affinity for Work Assignment, which allows IT teams to assign work to agents that have the most expertise dealing with a specific issue or familiarity with certain end users.

In general. Stern said IT organizations would be well-advised to starting walking back many of the biases that now exist among advocates of DevOps and legacy ITIL-based approaches to managing IT. Both approaches are equally relevant depending on the task at hand. The challenge now is providing access to a common pool of data that informs those processes, he said.

There’s no doubt that ITIL and DevOps frameworks will continue to evolve side-by-side for many years to come. In fact, the latest iteration of the ITIL framework borrows many of the concepts for adroitly managing IT infrastructure from best practices that were pioneered by DevOps practitioners. The balance that needs to be struck is finding a way to respond faster to rapidly changing application and business conditions without sacrificing a structured approach to managing IT that makes it possible to consistently scale systems that are highly resilient.

Naturally, it may be a while before that balance is struck. However, AI will play a critical role in enabling organizations to achieve that goal. Given the complexity of modern IT environments, it’s simply not possible to effectively manage IT by relying on manual processes or custom scripts that don’t scale. AI is not likely to replace the need for human IT expertise anytime soon, but it will go a long way to maximizing what is already an overtaxed resource often subject to more fallibility than anyone cares to admit.

— Mike Vizard

March 11, 2020
Nerdio Unfurls Management Tools for WVD on Azure

Nerdio has launched a management tool that makes it easier to provision large numbers of virtual desktops on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

Company CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy said that now that Microsoft is finally encouraging organizations to embrace desktop virtualization in the form of its Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service, there is a need for tools to manage all those desktops.

Nerdio Manager for WVD fills that gap by providing support for, among other things, dynamic host pools that automatically grow and shrink depending on workload and desktop images that can be employed across thousands of users.

Vladimirskiy said Nerdio Manager for WVD runs natively on Azure, which among other things allows all the data it collects to remain within the geo-boundaries of the selected Azure region. No additions to an Azure subscription are required to store that data, he noted.

Fresh off raising an additional $8 million in funding, Nerdio is riding the coattails of a relatively newfound enthusiasm at Microsoft for virtual desktops. While the concept of a virtual desktop has been around for the better part of two decades, Microsoft has only been encouraging IT organizations to embrace virtual desktops since the WVD Service became available on Azure in the last several months. Previously, Windows licensing restrictions tended to make virtual desktops less economically attractive.

Rather than organizations relying on Citrix or VMware for virtual desktops, Microsoft is now making a case for employing its Azure cloud service to subscribe to virtual desktops as a less complicated alternative that also supports both Windows 10 and Windows 7. That means IT teams that embrace Windows 7 on Azure will be supported by Microsoft.

It’s not clear to what degree Windows desktops will move into the cloud now that Microsoft has embraced the concept. In addition, it’s also worth noting that rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) now provide similar desktop virtualization services. What is clear is many fewer instances of Windows will be running locally as more organizations determine it might be easier for them to manage Windows desktops via the cloud than on each individual machine. At the same time, many organizations are also looking at ways to more easily enable remote computing to help limit potential employee exposure to the COVID-19 virus.

Whatever the path forward, it’s not likely large enterprise IT organizations will make the jump to WVD or any other cloud service all at once. IT administrators may find themselves managing a hybrid desktop computing environment for many years to come. There are also, of course, organizations operating in highly regulated industries where virtual desktops running on a public cloud are simply not an option.

Nevertheless, it’s apparent the time when IT administrators had to spend time visiting individual desktop machines is coming to an end. The management of both virtual desktops and physical endpoints is becoming more automated with each passing day. The only real question is what degree of automation can be achieved based on where the desktop actually resides.

— Mike Vizard

March 11, 2020
Survey Finds IT More Challenging to Manage Than Ever

A survey of 415 IT executives published today shows IT teams are struggling to keep up as the number of platforms that need to be managed continues to expand rapidly.

Conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of Volterra, a provider of a distributed computing platform, the survey finds 97% are planning to distribute workloads across two or more clouds. The top three reasons cited for adopting multiple clouds were the need to maximize availability and reliability (63%), meeting regulatory and compliance requirements (47%), and leveraging best-of-breed services from each provider (42%).

At the same time, the survey finds 70% of survey respondents said it’s “very important” to have a consistent operational experience between the edge and public and private clouds.

The survey, however, also makes it clear IT leaders understand that achieving the goal will be a significant challenge. The top issues identified when employing multiple clouds are establishing secure and reliable connectivity between providers (60%), employing different support and consulting processes (54%) and navigating different platform services (53%).

The rise of edge computing is going to further exacerbate those challenges. The survey finds the difficulty in managing apps across multiple edge locations (44%) and an inability to accommodate the IT infrastructure needed to host and operate at the edge (38%) as the two major edge computing issues identified by survey respondents. In terms of specific technical challenges identified, integrating cloud-native workflows such as automation, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and performance management (69%) and trouble installing a full set of application infrastructure spanning compute, storage and network and security (67%) top the list of issues.

As far as lifecycle management at the edge is concerned, the two biggest long-term issues identified are the lack of resources or time to keep applications and infrastructure up to date (37%) and managing silos of distributed clusters (26%).

Mark Weiner, chief marketing officer for Volterra, said the survey makes it clear there soon will come a day when IT organizations will need to centralize the management of an increasingly extended enterprise. IT organizations may have adopted public clouds aggressively, yet 70% to 80% of all workloads still run in an on-premises IT environment. At the same time, the number of workloads that will be distributed to edge computing platforms is set to explode. The survey identifies the primary reasons more workloads will be deployed on the edge as the need to control and analyze data locally (54%) and the amount of latency experienced when sending edge data to public cloud-based apps (47%).

Ultimately, the goal is to have a hybrid cloud computing environment through which the management of IT is as centralized as possible. While the cost of deploying workloads in a public cloud is comparatively inexpensive, it turns out the total cost of IT continues to increase as IT teams find themselves managing more distributed platforms than ever. It may be a while before IT teams have the tools and processes in place to rein in those costs. However, at this point, it’s more a question of how and when that goal will be accomplished, not if.

— Mike Vizard

March 9, 2020
Zoho Offers Free SaaS Apps to Combat Coronavirus Spread

Zoho today announced it is making available for free a bundle of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications dubbed Remotely through July 1.

Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist for Zoho, said Remotely is a humanitarian gesture to help mitigate the impact of a global coronavirus epidemic. Remotely comprises a set of productivity and collaboration applications that users can access in as little as five minutes.

Included in Remotely are productivity, collaboration and project management applications as well as tools that automate the migration of data into the Zoho cloud platform.

Vergesna said Remotely also addresses cybersecurity concerns by enabling IT teams to apply security controls to the data that employees are allowed to access. Of course, IT organizations in many cases would still need to make sure the network connections being employed to access SaaS applications are secure.

Now that many local governments are recommending that organizations allow employees to work from home to help limit the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, many IT administrators are scrambling to provide remote access to applications at scale. It’s one thing to provide access to a small number of employees who might travel intermittently, but it’s quite another to support an entire remote workforce for some unknown period of time.

Vergesna, however, said that at this point the challenges associated with making that transition have a lot more to do with overcoming cultural issues than they do the technology. Much of the transition to Zoho SaaS applications has been automated, he said.

It remains to be seen to what degree the coronavirus outbreak might accelerate the transition to cloud applications. Many IT administrators are still managing local instances of Windows servers to deliver applications because the time and effort to migrate to SaaS applications have been substantial. Making those on-premises applications available remotely at scale is not only challenging from a technical perspective, but it’s also expensive.

Of course, Zoho is far from being the only provider of SaaS productivity and collaboration applications. However, it remains to be seen whether other providers will follow Zoho’s lead. The hope each of these vendors has is that once the coronavirus crisis passes many of the organizations that take advantage of their software to enable employees to work from home will start paying to use that software.

In the meantime, the economic impact of the coronavirus is likely to be staggering. Conferences are being canceled and face-to-face business meetings are being shifted online. It’s hard to say how many of those meetings are likely to stay there for good. At the very least, many more end users are about out to discover just how rich SaaS application environments have become. In many cases, IT teams will stitch together workflows across a range of SaaS applications using application programming interfaces (APIs). The challenge they will face is acquiring the programming skills required to construct those workflows.

— Mike Vizard

March 6, 2020
DevOps Deeper Dive: Mainframe Fallout from BMC’s Compuware Buy

The acquisition of Compuware this week by rival BMC Software signals that the rate at which mainframe environments are being modernized might not be occurring fast enough to support a vibrant third-party tools provider ecosystem.

Both BMC and Compuware were sold to private equity firms in 2018 and 2014, respectively. Thoma Bravo, which acquired Compuware, is now selling the company to KKR. BMC was acquired by KKR in 2018 from Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital for $8.5 billion. BMC was originally taken private by investors in 2013.

Other rivals in the mainframe category include CA Technologies, which was acquired for $18.9 billion by Broadcom last year, and Micro Focus, which includes software assets originally developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

BMC executives declined to comment on the merger and terms of the deal for Compuware were not disclosed.

All these machinations by private equity investors doesn’t do much to inspire confidence among end customers, said Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Judith Hurwitz & Associates, a market research and IT consulting firm.

“Private equity firms always have to eventually look for an exit,” she said. “In this case, one investor wanted out.”

That leaves IT leaders in the unenviable position of not knowing whether the application development platform on which they have standardized might be around for the long haul, said Hurwitz.

The challenge faced by third-party providers of application development tools in the mainframe space is largely two-fold. While the number of workloads running on mainframes continues to increase thanks mainly to availability of Linux on the platform, the number of organizations that have a mainframe has declined. The low end of the mainframe market has been eroded by high-end distributed systems. In addition, many applications that previously ran on a mainframe have been shifted into a public cloud.

The second challenge these providers face is IBM, which is now a much more formidable competitor in the mainframe tooling sector. IBM has launched a series of initiatives to provide tools to modernize mainframe platforms using best DevOps practices as part of a larger digital business transformation initiative. However, regardless of the relative strengths of IBM’s DevOps portfolio, there will always be a significant base of mainframe shops that will prefer tools from IBM over those provided by a third-party rival.

In a prepared statement shared via email, Barry Baker, vice president of IBM Z Software, said:

Over the last 18 months, we’ve come a long way to expand the ecosystem for mainframe skills by bringing new tools to IBM Z and LinuxONE. Our goal remains unchanged – to make development on Z a common experience for all developers across the tech stack – not just mainframe developers. We’ve made significant progress toward this goal with the adoption of DevOps and industry-standard tools like Git and Jenkins on the platform, along with our own offerings including IBM Z Open Development and IBM Z Unit Testing. We took another step with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z, further enabling cloud developers to deploy z/OS applications using OpenShift without any special Z skills required.

We continue to invest and over the next few months we’ll be unveiling even more tools across three focus areas: developer experience, automation and operations to truly deliver on our promise for a cloud native experience – and encourage our clients to watch this space.”

Of course, all of IBM’s tooling rivals in the mainframe space have launched similar DevOps initiatives. The challenge they all face is the rate at which mainframe organizations are embracing DevOps may not be fast enough to sustain a vibrant third-party ecosystem. Not surprisingly, BMC has also been extending its reach to encompass distributed computing platforms. Competition among tooling vendors on those platforms is already fierce.

There can be no doubt mainframes will continue to play a crucial role in IT. Most large enterprises are still dependent on mainframes to run some of their most mission-critical transaction processing applications. Less clear is to what degree those organizations intend to modernize those applications beyond simply making application programming interfaces (APIs) available for legacy applications. IBM, along with every provider of development tools for the mainframe, has been making a case of deploying new applications running on Linux on a mainframe because the total cost is lower than trying to connect those applications running on a distributed system to a legacy mainframe application.

A recent global survey conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Micro Focus suggests that argument is starting to resonate. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said some form of modernization was favored over the replacing and retiring of older COBOL-based systems in 2020.

Regardless of how much economic sense that argument makes, however, the rate at which mainframe applications are being modernized will, at best, continue to be an extended process.

— Mike Vizard

March 6, 2020
Mission Makes AWS Expertise Available for Free

Mission, a provider of managed services for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, this week announced it will make its cloud optimization expertise available free of charge for any IT organization that acquires AWS licenses through it.

Alex Beal, director of product for Mission, said as cloud sprawl continues to be an issue, many internal IT teams simply don’t have the expertise required to rein in those costs. However, rather than charge extra for the expertise Mission will now make its tools and consultants available for free under the auspices of the Mission Cloud Foundation service to any organization that employs Mission to acquire AWS licenses, he said, noting every Cloud Foundation customer will get access to a designated Mission Cloud Analyst who will provide regular account reviews and guidance on implementing best practices.

Mission can provide the free service because it acquires licenses from AWS at a lower cost. Effectively, AWS is paying for the services being provided by Mission, said Beal.

As more workloads move into the public cloud, IT teams are struggling to navigate a complex mix of service levels from AWS that range from spot pricing options to reserved instances that can be licensed for specific periods of time at a deep discount. However, determining which workloads lend themselves best to various AWS pricing options can be challenging to determine, especially for developers who spin up virtual machines without consulting with internal IT teams. Collectively, organizations are wasting millions of dollars each year because of suboptimal usage of public cloud resources. Beal estimated that the average IT organization is wasting about $5,000 a year on cloud infrastructure resources that could be better allocated to other IT initiatives.

Beal said Mission will work with those internal IT teams to identify unused resources and rightsizing candidates, set up budget alerts and recommend better options for specific types of workloads using a combination of monitoring tools from third parties such as CloudHealth and one developed by Mission. Those monitoring tools are also employed to enforce budget constraints and run security checks.

Mission Cloud Foundation also includes tools to reallocate charges, reference purchase order numbers and set up automated custom reports.

Most IT organizations could develop much of this expertise on their own. However, Beal said most IT teams also have better things to do with their time that add more value to their organization. Instead of acquiring licenses direct from AWS, Mission is making a case for an alternative approach that provides a level of service and support that AWS generally only provides to Global 2000 customers.

Other managed services providers (MSPs) may or may not also provide tools and expertise free of charge. Savvy IT teams, however, may soon force the issue. After all, while public cloud represents the most widely employed form of IT infrastructure as code, from a cost perspective it’s also clear public clouds can also quite easily become too much of a good thing.

— Mike Vizard

March 5, 2020
DevOps Brings Pressure to Bear on Database Management

The rise of DevOps is starting to have a significant impact on the rate at which databases now need to be deployed and updated. A global survey of more than 2,000 developers, database specialists and IT leaders conducted by Redgate Software, a provider of tools for automating the management of databases, finds nearly half (49%) are now deploying database changes in production at least once a week or more.

Kendra Little, DevOps advocate for Redgate Software, said most of the changes are being driven by the adoption of best DevOps practices that are now having a cascading impact on other functions in the IT environment.

However, the survey shows the adoption of DevOps remains uneven. Only 18% of respondents said they have adopted DevOps across all projects, while 36% said they have adopted DevOps across some projects. Another 14% said they are at the proof-of-concept stage. Only 13% said their organizations have no plans to adopt DevOps at all. Survey respondents in the financial services and insurance industry sectors have the highest levels of adoption, with more than 77% of respondents saying their organizations are either in proof of concepts (16%), have adopted across some projects (41%) or have adopted across all projects (20%).

Progress appears to be rapid among those that have adopted DevOps. Well over a third (37%) report that only 1% or less of their deployments introduce code defects that require hotfixes. That compares to 30% for all other groups.

The survey also revealed that more than half of respondents (55%) perform most or all of their business-critical database deployments while their systems are still online, with 75% of that group reporting that 10% or less of those deployments caused defects that require hotfixes. Nearly half (46%) are also employing some of automation to deploy databases, according to the survey.

Nevertheless, the survey makes it clear challenges remain. Disruptions to existing workflows and business was cited as the top barrier to adoption (23%), followed by lack of skills (22%) and lack of alignment between developers and operations (16%).

Little said the survey makes it apparent that database management needs to become more aligned with the software development life cycle (SDLC) with organizations transitioning to DevOps. Over a quarter of respondents (26%) said it is still somewhat or very difficult to get code reviews for database changes. A further 16% said that no code reviews are done for database changes early in the development cycle.

Less clear is who precisely is managing the database. Developers in the Age of DevOps are exercising more influence over what databases are employed. However, Little noted that 43% of organizations still have a database administrator managing their databases. That compares to 34% that rely on developers and 21% that have a combination of both. Over time, Little said most organizations will continue to shift toward a combination of both. That, of course, will require a significant amount of cultural change within most IT organizations, where all too often developers have tended to view DBAs as a bottleneck to be eliminated whenever and wherever possible.

— Mike Vizard

March 5, 2020
Quest Software Expands MDM Cloud Reach

Quest Software today extended the reach of its mobile device management (MDM) service to provide more granular control over mobile devices and applications in addition to being able to track their location.

Capabilities being added to the KACE Cloud MDM service include support for a “Kiosk Mode” for Android devices that allows administrators to lock down a device and limit activity to a specific application or task, as well as a Disallowed Apps feature that brings the same level of blacklisting capability to Android devices that currently exists for Apple iOS devices.

Quest Software has also added file encryption tools for MacOS devices and extended the multi-tenant capabilities of cloud service to enable profiles to be applied within Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager.

Jody Evans, product manager for KACE Cloud MDM at Quest Software, said the latest updates to the service are intended to make it easier for IT teams to manage a broad range of mobile computing devices using a cloud service they don’t have to deploy and manage.

Longer-term, the goal for most IT teams will be to unify endpoint management as much as possible relying on cloud services. In the meantime, most organizations will continue to rely on a mix of cloud services and local appliances to manage endpoints, said Evans.

It’s not clear to what degree or at what rate IT organizations are unifying the management of endpoints. Internal IT teams tend to manage desktops and laptops. Mobile computing devices such as tablets and smartphones, however, are often managed via portals provided by telecommunications carriers or managed service providers (MSPs).

Competition across the IT systems management category is naturally fierce. The KACE product line has been around since 2003, when the company developed appliances to automate the management of Windows desktops. In 2010, Dell acquired KACE Networks and in 2012 it acquired Quest Software, which, along with KACE Networks and SonicWall, became part of Dell Software. At roughly the same time, VMware, also part of Dell, had also been expanding its reach into the realm of MDM via acquisitions.

To help raise the cash needed to take Dell private, Quest Software and SonicWall were formally separated into two separate companies that were sold to venture capital firms. The KACE product line remained with Quest Software. Since then, Quest Software has been gradually rolling out instances of its portfolio that are delivered as a cloud service.

At the same time, however, ITSM is being transformed by the rise of DevOps. While most endpoints are still managed using service desks based on ITIL frameworks that typically rely on job tickets to manage tasks, many of the mobile applications that reside on those platforms are being managed using DevOps processes to deliver a richer end user experience faster. It’s not at all clear to what degree the management of endpoints using ITIL processes and mobile applications using DevOps processes will converge.

In the meantime, reliance on mobile applications and devices continues to increase. Many end users now spend more time on tablets and smartphones than they do in front of traditional desktop systems. The challenge IT teams now face is determining the best way to manage an IT endpoint landscape that has never been more diverse or complex.

— Mike Vizard

March 3, 2020
Lenovo Looks to Automate Edge Computing

Lenovo is extending its IT automation framework for provisioning IT infrastructure out to edge computing platforms.

Charles Ferland, vice president and general manager for networking and communications service providers at Lenovo Data Center Group, said the Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) framework provides a single pane of glass through which IT teams can not only provision IT infrastructure but also invoke other frameworks to automate, for example, the deployment of virtual machines on top of that IT infrastructure.

Ferland said while there are plenty of frameworks for automating the deployment of virtual machines, many IT teams will spend weeks manually provisioning IT infrastructure. LOC-A provides a mechanism to reduce the time and effort required to minutes. However, rather than completely reinvent the IT automation wheel, Lenovo decided to also integrate LOC-A with frameworks such as Ansible, Puppet and Chef, he said, noting that approach makes it possible for IT teams to adopt LOC-A without having to replace any of the IT automation frameworks they already might have in place.

LOC-A can also be extended to edge computing platforms other than ones provided by Lenovo, he added.

Beyond simply reducing the amount of time required to provision IT infrastructure, Ferland noted LOC-A also serves to reduce errors that typically occur when IT teams manually provision IT infrastructure. In many cases, those configuration errors can lead to cybersecurity issues later. Of course, many IT teams have developed custom scripts to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure. However, most of those scripts don’t scale and are poorly documented, noted Ferland. When a member of the IT team that wrote the script leaves the company, often the IT team left behind must develop another script. In many cases, IT personnel view the scripts they develop as a tool that belongs to them rather than the company that hired them. Ferland said the primary goal is to provide a scalable IT automation framework that helps IT teams further advance the adoption of best DevOps practices.

Ferland said Lenovo developed LOC-A to provide a cloud-like experience for on-premises IT infrastructure that is similar to what IT teams experience when provisioning IT infrastructure on a public cloud computing platform. LOC-A is currently being employed by telecommunications carriers including T-Systems.

It’s no coincidence Lenovo’s decision to extend LOC-A to the edge comes at a time when carriers are creating 5G networks that require applications to be processed in real-time as close to where data is created. Those edge computing platforms are going to be deployed in, for example, locations that IT teams are not going to be able to physically reach easily.

It’s unclear to what degree IT automation frameworks might induce IT teams to standardize on IT infrastructure at the edge. Lenovo, however, clearly views providing this capability as a means to differentiate its platforms at a time when there is currently very little standardization at the edge. The challenge, of course, is the less standardization at the edge there is, the more difficult it becomes to manage.

— Mike Vizard

March 3, 2020