Two major trends impacting enterprise IT worldwide is
- The move towards cloud-based IT service delivery (from dedicated or virtualized server deployments inside customers data centers or with 3rd party DC operators), and
- Global sourcing of IT operations and service delivery, or off-shoring when handing over IT operations and delivery to "offshore" IT suppliers
Both of them are concerned with or aims to, I would argue, reduce IT cost through increased IT automation.
The journey from legacy, classic server environments to cloud-based IT service delivery models can be depicted as in fig 1 below.
Here, various IT systems with a enterprise customer or let's say with a IT service provider, are in various stages of being run on classic, legacy IT environments on virtualized server platforms or maybe has made the leap to a VM IaaS/PaaS setup with a cloud service provider.
For legacy IT environments, typically one IT system are running on a dedicated hardware and database platform, and IT budgeting is usually done based on CAPEX upfront, 3-4 years write-off period. Legacy IT environments would be based on IT systems popular 10-20 years ago, i.e. SUN servers running Solaris, HP servers running HP-UX, IBM servers running AIX etc, even pre MS WinServer pre 2012 server on COTS Intel servers.
Some of these IT systems or business applications running on them would be able to make the leap onto virtualized IT-platforms, either as part of a major server consolidation projects that most enterprise IT departments would be running since the dot.com era. Leading candidates or candidate of course being VMWare, with freeware hypervisors like KVM and Zen, additional hypervisors form Citrix, Parallels and others being utilized also.
When a critical mass of virtualized servers were reached, the creation and utilization of server instances could be viewed as OPEX and on a per month, week basis, the cost of each new VM being incremental. Also when a critical mass of CPU cores on a number of physical servers were reached, it was each to provision VMs from a pool of available CPU cores, over-commit on VM cores that were scheduled to being put into production or assign cores to VMs for dedicated VM resources and instances. At a higher price than pool-VMs.
With virtualized servers, server or VM provisioning and configuration could be dramatically automated and lead times for VMs were/are dramatically lower than installing dedicated, physical servers - seconds and minutes versus days and weeks. VM re-configuration could also be done on the fly with "instant" re-sizing of VM CPU cores, memory and disk-space changes and allocation. A significant higher degree of automation and IT-production levels were achieved with virtualized servers, leading to lower IT cost overall (per VM, per IT employee, per production unit etc).
Some IT workloads and IT systems has made the transition onto private or public cloud infrastructures, leading to a even higher degree of IT automation than traditionally available from both virtualized or legacy IT environments, Between highly virtualized and automated IT environments and cloud based IT-delivery there aren't really a clear cut switch-over or demarcation line, but I guess cloud based IT delivery are seen as having a higher degree of auto-scaling and capacity on demand than a single location VM-environment. Plus a higher degree of self-serve support and options for IT management than a on-prem solution. IT departments did server virtualization for themselves and to meet corporate cost targets, while cloud IT delivery are available to a wider audience with an associated price plan, service catalog and SLA accessible in a way not always seen with corporate IT departments.
For many end-users, business applications delivered as a SaaS-solution, represents state of the art in automated IT delivery, "just" insert the data and press play. While cloud IaaS or PaaS-delivery would be state of IT-automation for IT-departments and developers.
In many ways, outsourcing and offshoring of IT operations and service delivery, can be seen as an IT automation drive also.
If we apply a onshore (on-prem) and offshore dimension to illustration above, we have a lineup as depicted in figure 2.
Corporate IT systems are, in addition to various state of "physical to cloud"server platforms, in different states of being managed and operated onshore locally (on-prem with customer, with 3rd party local IT-provider) or with a offshore, seen from the customers point of view, IT provider performing day to day operations, maintenance and incident management.
These day to day operations and maintenance work are being performed inside or based on well-defined work packages and by personnel that has specific module certifications on various Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, HP, RedHat, EMC/VMWare etc IT platforms and systems. In turn this means that IT management are removed from specific personal skill-sets or knowledge, and one set of work tasks lets say on a Oracle DB can be performed interchangeably by different Oracle-trained personnel, and one reaches a new level of IT automation where the personal/personnel factor is taken out of the IT operations equation. Work tasks gets increasingly specific and well specified, customers avoid customer specific adaptations and developments as far as possible, i.e IT work and delivery gets boxed in and turned into work modules specified down to the minute.
Put another way, part of the cost benefit of offshore IT delivery are down to the modularization of IT work tasks and IT operations that offshore providers have achieved compared to in-house IT,
Thus the transition B in figure 2 is part of an overall mega-trend that uses IT automation to reach lower IT production costs, and it will be interesting to see how the IT service delivery business unfolds between offshore IT-providers and cloud-based IT delivery. Or more likely, how offshore IT-providers use cloud-based delivery options (their own private cloud services, mix of public clouds) to reach new IT automation levels and increased market share.
Erik Jensen, 19.11.2014
These day to day operations and maintenance work are being performed inside or based on well-defined work packages and by personnel that has specific module certifications on various Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, HP, RedHat, EMC/VMWare etc IT platforms and systems. In turn this means that IT management are removed from specific personal skill-sets or knowledge, and one set of work tasks lets say on a Oracle DB can be performed interchangeably by different Oracle-trained personnel, and one reaches a new level of IT automation where the personal/personnel factor is taken out of the IT operations equation. Work tasks gets increasingly specific and well specified, customers avoid customer specific adaptations and developments as far as possible, i.e IT work and delivery gets boxed in and turned into work modules specified down to the minute.
Put another way, part of the cost benefit of offshore IT delivery are down to the modularization of IT work tasks and IT operations that offshore providers have achieved compared to in-house IT,
Thus the transition B in figure 2 is part of an overall mega-trend that uses IT automation to reach lower IT production costs, and it will be interesting to see how the IT service delivery business unfolds between offshore IT-providers and cloud-based IT delivery. Or more likely, how offshore IT-providers use cloud-based delivery options (their own private cloud services, mix of public clouds) to reach new IT automation levels and increased market share.
Erik Jensen, 19.11.2014
