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Tag: IDC

  • IDC Tech Spotlight: Making Open Source Work for You

    IDC Tech Spotlight: Making Open Source Work for You

    Starting from remarkably humble beginnings over three decades ago, open source software is the story of a better mousetrap that wins over the world. Originally, the intent of open source projects was to create software that system administrators and developers could use without having to pay licensing fees – but it has become much, much more. This IDC Technology Spotlight takes a deeper look at the value proposition associated with using commercially supported open source software in mission-critical environments, like IBM Z.

    To read more, please visit: IDC Tech Spotlight: Making Open Source Work for You: Achieving Optimum Value, Security, and Productivity

  • Modernize Without Disruption

    Modernize Without Disruption

    How to modernize without disruption.

    Through recessions, geopolitical shifts, pandemics and threats to global security, IBM® Z® has proven to be the most reliable, high-performing and secure platform in the industry. It’s time to expose the flexibility, agility and efficiency to provide an open and inclusive infrastructure that supports shifting business models and delivers strategic value.

    With Rocket modernization solutions, you can create an innovation layer that securely extends IBM Z capabilities with familiar software that today’s most innovative programmers use to deliver the modern and intuitive experiences customers demand. Get more from your legacy systems so you can create legendary, real-world outcomes for your customers.

    Reinvigorate your traditional infrastructure.

    Enabled with the right tools and technologies, organizations can modernize without disruption. Rocket Software can help you meet changing market demands with software solutions to drive value from your existing investments.

    Expand your talent pool to attract today’s most innovative programmers.

    • Rocket® LegaSuite® and Rocket® API – No-code modernization tools to deliver modern, intuitive user experiences that increase productivity and customer satisfaction.
    • Rocket® Open AppDev for z/OS® – With 1-click porting, give your developers their preferred open software through a system that combines the high security and support IBM Z customers demand with an easy user experience.

    Bring modern DevOps to your traditional systems securely with the familiar tools and intuitive experiences users demand.

    • Rocket® Aldon® – IBM® i ALM and DevOps platform allows your developers to work with the tools and environments they expect to develop innovative applications, while providing the process management and compliance reporting needed for today’s businesses.

    Support remote working by quickly and seamlessly adapting call center and service operations.

    • Rocket® Terminal Emulator® – Anytime, anywhere remote terminal emulation for your critical applications that delivers a lower total cost of ownership while improving the user experience.

    To read more, please visit: Modernize Without Disruption

  • Research Firms Agree, Cloud Growth Continues to Soar

    Research Firms Agree, Cloud Growth Continues to Soar

    Investment in all the various types of cloud computing has gone gangbusters in recent years, and for good reason: Cloud computing helps to cut cost, shorting time to market, provides unrivaled scale and reliability.

    This will only continue as enterprises continue to divest from on-premises infrastructure over the long term while seeking to scale the tremendous data generated by AI, IoT, machine learning and digital transformation. It looks as though for the few years ahead, it’s nothing but tailwinds for cloud investment and growth.

    According to research firm Gartner Inc., the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market reached $48.2 billion in 2016, growing more rapidly than the firm previously projected—although Gartner didn’t say in the release what its previous revenue prediction had been.

    Currently, Gartner expects the total worldwide public cloud services market to grow 18.5 percent in 2017 to reach $260.2 billion. That’s up considerably from $219.6 billion in 2016.

    According to Gartner, SaaS revenue is expected to grow 21 percent this year to reach $58.6 billion. “The acceleration in SaaS adoption can be explained by providers delivering nearly all application functional extensions and add-ons as a service. This appeals to users because SaaS solutions are engineered to be more purpose-built and are delivering better business outcomes than traditional software is,” Gartner writes.

    The highest-revenue growth will come from cloud system infrastructure-as-a-service, which Gartner says is projected to grow 36.6 percent in 2017 and hit $34.7 billion.

    Cloud Mojo Keeps on Rising

    Cloud is only going to continue to take a greater share of overall spend in the years ahead. According to Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, last year about 17 percent of the total market for infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services shifted to cloud, and by 2021, that will rise to 28 percent.

    Those looking at trends outside of cloud won’t be surprised to see cloud growing so much greater than that of the overall global economy. According to research firm IDC, worldwide information and communications technology (ICT) is set to rise over the next five years, fueled by IoT, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.

    Total ICT spending on traditional IT, telecom services and new technologies will grow to $5.6 trillion by 2021 from $4.3 trillion in 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent in constant currency terms. Annual growth will accelerate through the forecast period, to 6.5 percent in 2021 from 5.5 percent in 2017, as new technologies account for a growing proportion of the overall market, IDC writes.

    Of course, all of this will increase investment in security and, according to a recent report from Markets and Markets, the cloud security marketing, including identity, data leak prevention, intrusion detection/prevention systems, encryption and security information and event management systems. According to Markets and Markets, the cloud security market will grow to $12.73 billion by 2022, up from only $4.09 billion in 2017.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Microservices define the next era of IT

    Microservices define the next era of IT

    There is a lot of focus on DevOps and container technologies these days. Both are very strong trends in IT on their own, but each is also proof of a larger shift in IT culture to a microservices architecture. A new report from IDC titled “The Emergence of Microservices as a New Architectural Approach to Building New Software Systems” takes a closer look at the evolution and impact of microservices.

    Let’s start with the obvious question: What exactly is microservices? “Microservices is an architectural approach that draws on long evolving experience in software engineering and system design, including the SOA efforts of the last two decades,” said Al Hilwa, research director, Application Development Software at IDC. “Microservices architecture is enabled by a spectrum of tools categories but is primarily an architectural approach to system design that also requires considerable organizational and cultural adjustment to execute successfully.”

    Put another way, microservices is an umbrella term that applies to breaking systems and applications down to a more granular, modular level. Containers are an example of taking an application and making it into a self-contained component, and DevOps provides the framework for developing, deploying, and managing the container ecosystem.

    By some interpretations microservices and containers are somewhat synonymous. In other words, microservices is just another way of saying that an organization is using container technologies for app development and deployment. IDC classifies microservices more broadly, saying it is based on an approach to organizing software development—more of a concept and less of an actual product or technology.

    The Wikipedia definition of microservices sums it up like this: “In computing, microservices is a software architecture style, in which complex applications are composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.”

    Although the concept of microservices is broader than the underlying platforms or tools it uses, IDC acknowledges that the advancements in software development and deployment methodologies—namely DevOps and container technologies—has played a pivotal role in elevating microservices to where it is today.

    The transition from a traditional hardware server infrastructure in an on-premise datacenter to a cloud-based, software-defined infrastructure that can be created, modified, or removed programmatically offers significant benefits for organizations. The microservices architecture enables companies to be much more agile and cut costs at the same time.

    There are some challenges and concerns as well, though. Hilwa notes, “Microservices architecture, by its very nature, is distributed and operates across networks and can thus exact significant performance penalties that must be accommodated with architectural solutions, like caching layers and API management and optimization techniques.”

    In the IDC report Hilwa talks about the need for strong organizational support and an overall shift in the IT culture in order to succeed with microservices. As Hilwa puts it, “Organizations have to increase their tolerance for risk and learn to fail gracefully, fast and often in order to achieve success.”

    Hilwa provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of microservices in the report along with some prescriptive guidance for organizations that are either just trying to understand what microservices is, or those that have already waded into microservices but want a better appreciation for the benefits and pitfalls.

  • The real cost of downtime

    The real cost of downtime

    Stephen Elliot and the IDC team recently released a report (registration required) sponsored by AppDynamics that examines the true cost of downtime and infrastructure failure, as well as DevOps adoption. The headline numbers are pretty eye-opening:

    • For the Fortune 1000, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion.
    • The average hourly cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour.
    • The average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million.

    Let those numbers just sink in a moment. Between $1 to $2.5 billion lost to application downtime a year!  That is a big number, but if you look at the follow on numbers you can see how you can get there. Infrastructure failure has an average hourly cost of $100k per hour, critical application failure has an average hourly cost of $500k to $1m per hour. It doesn’t take a lot of hours for those numbers to add up. You can read in the report the actual math IDC applied to reach these conclusions based on the responses to a survey they undertook.

    There was also some good insight into DevOps and DevOps tools adoption.  Remember this was aimed at the Fortune 1000 market segment, so large enterprises. About 43% of respondents were using DevOps currently, with another 40% planning on adopting DevOps soon. That 83% number is in line with another recent survey by CA that showed an 88% number.

    But all is not as rosy as that picture paints.  When looking at the biggest impediments to DevOps, the usual suspects rear their ugly heads:

    • Cultural inhibitors – 56.7%
    • Fragmented processes – 43.3%
    • Lack of executive support – 26.7%

    All three of these topics have been the fodder for stories here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. There are specific strategies to overcome each of these, but the fact is they are still major obstacles to successful DevOps adoption despite overwhelming desire to do so.

    There was another interesting metric in the study that bears noting as well. It is about companies who try to use their existing tool sets in a DevOps setting. There is something like an 80% failure rate for companies who try to adapt their existing tools for DevOps practices.  That screams out something that many a man already knows, “you need the right tool to do the job right.”  The moral of that story is if you are going DevOps you damn better be buying some DevOps specific tools to get the job done right.

    Again in line with other surveys I have seen the biggest initiatives driving DevOps adoption are:

    • Automation 60%
    • Continuous delivery 50%
    • Continuous integration 43.3%
    • Automated testing 43.3%
    • Application monitoring/management 43.3%

    DevOps was being initiated by slightly more development teams that IT Ops teams by about a 40% to 33% margin respectively.

    You can download the full report from the link at the top of the story to get the rest of the data.  Ultimately like similar surveys there are some assumptions that you have to swallow in order to give credence to the findings. For me the biggest grains of salt to consider are:

    1. This survey was based on a relatively small amount of respondents. On average like 50 per question and some of those not from organizations in the scope of the survey. With that small a group trends could be skewed by a handful of outlier responses.
    2. While IDC is a very reputable company, the fact is this was a sponsored survey by a DevOps tool vendor. AppDynamics likewise is a reputable company (and in full disclosure a sponsor here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud), nevertheless it is something you should take into consideration.
    3. Perhaps the biggest grain is: Do you buy their math in calculating downtime? According the report’s authors here is how they arrived at their numbers:

    To examine application downtime impact per year across the Fortune 1000, we conducted the

    following analysis:

    • 1,000 companies multiplied by an average of 250 critical applications per company equals 250,000 total applications. 250,000 multiplied by an average of $500 to $1 million per hour of downtime cost equals $1.25 billion to 2.5 billion of unplanned application downtime costs per year.

    That sounds like back of napkin stuff to me. But really at the end of the day whether the number is $1b, $2b or more, suffice to say it is a big number.

    Surveys like these continue to contribute to a broader understanding of the DevOps market. It also provides cover to IT executives seeking support to kick off DevOps in their own organizations. Hopefully we are approaching a critical mass of data that will make the job of “selling” DevOps up the org chart an easier sell.

    UPDATE:

    Here’s a great upcoming webinar that will include thought leadership from Stephen Elliot, VP of analyst firm IDC on “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime” based on research of Fortune 1000 companies.  Register for it now, here.