Digital transformation is not characterized by the rampant adoption of new-age technologies. The key distinction between digitalization and digital transformation lies in the end objective. And the end objective of any digital transformation strategy is delivering specific outcomes. 

In an era of rapidly changing customer experience, the primary marker of success for the Digital Enterprise is deploying personalized and relevant data-driven services that answer the client brief. Cloud has been one of the key technological pillars of the digitalization process and cloud foundry is facilitating the next phase of growth for these organizations.

The Changing Role of Cloud

Cloud technology has far surpassed its initial function as a catch-all solution to aging and legacy IT infrastructure. The gradual increase in business-critical workloads have long set up the arena for the entry cloud foundry environments that can tackle complex computational problems with greater ease. About 55% of organizations have stated that their digital transformation strategy pivots around a hybrid IT environment comprising of on- and off-premise cloud resources. In fact, 70% of large companies are leveraging the features of the hybrid cloud technology to achieve their business objectives. These features not only make room for traditional benefits like increased operational agility and lowered infrastructure costs, but make room for growth strategies and developments in digital infrastructure while balancing the strictures of IT investments.

Hybrid Solutions in an Era of Shifting Business Needs

At the same time, however, according to research from Ovum, while 20% of business processes have already moved to the cloud, 80% of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data are still running on-premises because of performance and regulatory requirements. Businesses need to consider an open, hybrid cloud approach to developing, running and deploying applications in a multi-cloud environment. So what do hybrid environments offer that single-cloud environments don’t:

• Ease of modernization: The flexibility and scalability of the cloud allows developers to move around components of legacy applications when it becomes inconvenient to continue hosting them in the private cloud. ‘Lifting and shifting’ also allows for the provision to build out certain features to make them more accessible and user-friendly.
• Improved connectivity: A high degree of integration between public and private clouds makes data transfer between the two environments much more streamlined and allows applications to function more smoothly.
• Security: Security has become a key consideration while creating customer experience strategies. Data warehouses are overflowing with valuable customer information, and if data breaches have taught us anything, it is that brand reputation and customer privacy are intrinsically linked. As such integrating robust security features is something that needs to be taken into consideration from the very initial stages of application development. Hybrid cloud environments provide a scalable and flexible basis on which to build out such features. 

Building Capabilities that Deliver

A major airline in North America wanted to revamp its ticket rebooking services and make the process more streamlined for customers stuck in transit. With extreme weather becoming more common in certain parts of the region, cancelled and delayed flights are no longer an uncommon feature. The company as a part of its customer experience strategy, with the aim of taking the pressure off from the customers looking to rebook flights, launched its services when Hurricane Irma made landfall. This example illustrates that it is imperative to take business-critical workloads out of testing and development to its go-live phase to gauge its efficacy in real-time.

With the capabilities that hybrid cloud computing can deliver, the question is no longer whether enterprises will adopt emerging cloud technologies, rather, when. In fact, hybrid cloud lies at the heart of delivering complex, digital heavy services in real-time. In fact, with multi-cloud environments gradually becoming the norm, enterprises can focus on streamlining demanding workloads, increasing reach and engagement, multiplying service capabilities and managing multiple vendors.

IBM Cloud and HCLTech bring together a unique approach to running VMware workloads in the cloud

However, with partnerships becoming a common feature, businesses can now leverage the rich ecosystem of vendor-partnerships to create and launch the next generation of enterprise solutions. Companies like IBM, VMware, and HCLTech already have a rich history of delivering compelling solutions for big brand clients and are coming together to facilitate the growth of digital enterprises through hybrid cloud solutions.

With this new collaboration, HCLTech can better leverage IBM Cloud’s automated VMware solution stack while leveraging Red Hat OpenShift automation and integration.

Kalyan Kumar, CVP and CTO of IT Services at HCLTech said, “The winning combination of IBM, VMware and HCLTech’s application modernization and migration capabilities is a major enabler for the digitalization of tomorrow. We’ve already achieved significant successes with VMware and IBM customers through our Cloud-Native Labs, providing our customers a minimum viable product and adoption acceleration to become more responsive digital enterprises.” 

The Velocity framework enables clients to achieve business transformation objectives by leveraging HCLTech’s 6,000 certified professionals with 2,000 having deep technical skills in VMware’s technology stack and ecosystem. Velocity combined with HCLTech’s deep domain expertise in application modernization and broad range of cloud-native services enables clients to abstract and automate digital infrastructure components accelerating their digital journey.

 “The expanding relationship between IBM, VMware and HCLTech is fundamentally about transforming and modernizing VMware applications leveraging IBM public cloud and the speed, agility, and standardization benefits of HCLTech’s Velocity Framework for our mutual clients,” said Harish Grama, General Manager, IBM public cloud. “We are excited to showcase new advancements and solutions that demonstrate IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions is the right cloud to run your VMware workloads. Only on IBM public cloud can you span classic enterprise multi-architecture lift-and-shift and broad VMware migration to cloud native leadership with broad support for Kubernetes, Knative, Istio, and Cloud Foundry.”

“This is exciting news for HCLTech clients, as they can now benefit from VMware’s consistent infrastructure and operations to seamlessly migrate to IBM Cloud," said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit. “VMware, HCLTech and IBM will offer clients the fastest and least expensive path to the cloud by eliminating requirement to refactor applications. Once in IBM Cloud, HCLTech clients are able to leverage the same infrastructure, teams, skills and tools have invested in for years while modernizing their applications with new cloud native capabilities.”

Conclusion

Social and environmental factors, business imperatives and consumer behaviors will continue to evolve and along with it, digitalization initiatives and the Digital Enterprise. With continuous concurrent advancements in AI/ML, blockchain, and other emerging technologies, hybrid cloud adoption will play a key role in delivering complex applications.