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JOURNEY TO THE

Digital Innovation sits down with IBM veteran Andy Brierley to discuss the myriad benefits of loud migration and how the right combination of partners can maximise success during this critical aspect of digital transformation.

Written by Nye Longman â&#x20AC;˘ Produced by Danielle Harris

“Cloud is ev still emergin very well u by many p organisation many IT fu ...When done in the right way, cloud migration can be a very effective asset for your organisation. You need to thoroughly understand the value it can bring; it can bring a great deal of agility but it can also be a great burden,” explains Andy Brierley, Vice President, Cloud Application Modernisation, at IBM. Andy and his team at IBM exist to help clients navigate and manage their journey to cloud adoption, while working proactively to ensure these businesses can fully understand and utilise cloud’s capabilities, tailoring them to the nuances of their industry and customerbase. 4

volving. It is ng. It is not understood people and ns and even unctions... IBMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cloud Application Modernisation team provides cloud-ready businesses with a suite of top-level services on their journey to full adoption, including the ability to refactor existing environments to more modern platforms, cloud or on-premise application integration, and visible, highly responsive multicloud environments. IBMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s extensive Cloud Stack consists of over 170 products and services all the way from data and containers, through to artificial intelligence, internet of things and blockchain. But before availing of all the company and its partners can offer, executives must first 5

Work. As one.

Employee experience is key to your productivity. When executing large-scale workplace and multi-cloud projects successfully, collaborating on a single vision is essential. IBM and Citrix have a long-standing track-record of working together seamlessly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; delivering best-in-class innovation. Citrix Workspace is the only solution that delivers an intelligent, secure and unified workspace that lets people do their best work while maintaining the best user experience.

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Intelligent. Work smarter, not harder. IBM managed mobility services alongside Citrix Workspace provides an intuitive central solution simplifying device management, desktops, SaaS and traditional apps, maximising employee experience.

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Deliver a smarter experience, read ‘The Experience of Work’ – a global report by Citrix and the Economist Intelligence Unit based on the knowledge of 1,000 senior business leaders. 7

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“I think businesses can create a more secure, more reliable, more robust, more resilient environment with cloud than using their own data centres” Andy Brierley

understand the business-case for cloud adoption before committing resources.

Case for the Cloud “There are some sceptics out there. I have had a number of conversations with c-level executives and I have asked them what their cloud strategy is. They will often come back to me and tell me the name of a popular platform!” Andy explains. While it is important to understand that cloud often means many things to different people in different industries, simply using a popular platform is not a strategy in itself and a more granular understanding is essential.

Learn more:

ibm.com/cloud/vmware

“The main benefit is consumptionbased pricing. If you move into a cloud environment then you pay for what you use” Andy Brierley

“I think there's a level of education on what cloud actually is and what can be achieved. I think businesses can create a more secure, more reliable, more robust, more resilient environment with cloud than using their own data centres,” Andy says. Alongside maximising the value of existing applications and delivering a whole host of cloud-native applications, timely adoption of the cloud brings many other benefits, Andy explains. “The main benefit is consumption-based pricing. If you move into a cloud environment then you pay for what you use,” he says. “If you're in a traditional data centre, you 12

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ÂŠ2019 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved. NETAPP, the NETAPP logo, and the marks listed at http://www.netapp.com/TM are trademarks of NetApp, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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have to pay for the infrastructure – the heating, the power, the lighting, the cooling – for peak usage. You will never know when peak usage will be – you can only predict it.” Once the business case has been understood, the CIO can then begin to get down to the nitty-gritty of aligning their organisational architecture with the cloud. “It is then looking at the individual applications themselves and trying to understand the right treatment for each,” Andy says. “We would do an application portfolio assessment, which involves looking through the applications themselves and understanding whether the right

treatment for that application was to rationalise it or retire it or maybe even re-architect it.” “We would then look at the business case for doing that – what's the business benefit of performing that effort on that application and what's the return on that investment, over what time?” Andy adds. Knowledge transfer is also an essential part of IBM’s cloud modernisation process, whether it is taking on a service or handing on back to the client. “We have a digital cloud garage which specialises in that kind of capability, where we help our clients to change their way of working to be more agile in nature and to create viable products,” Andy adds. 15

ignores it for long enough, he explains.

Solving Technical Debt – Forever Andy and his team have been delivering cutting-edge cloud solutions to IBM clients for a long time. Over the years, he has noticed a somewhat unsettling trend gradually gathering pace amongst some of the world’s most commercially and structurally important businesses. Technical debt, as industry pros call it, refers to legacy systems steadily accruing costs over time as quick-fixes take precedence over more time-consuming – but ultimately better – solutions. It is the elephant in the room that has been persistently troubling global industry since software became commonplace. It is an issue your business can’t afford to overlook and one that won’t simply disappear if your CIO 16

“Going back all the way to the 1970s, people were starting to use computers in their business and intelligent machines to do basic calculations. Computing in business has evolved considerably, but one consistent theme has remained in industry throughout that time – and that is technical debt,” Andy says. “Generation after generation of CIOs have failed to address technical debt and have handed this issue back to their successor. Time and time again. Much critical infrastructure runs on a system written in Fortran 77 running on a VAX VMS system that was obsolete by about 1991.” Migrating applications to the cloud and killing the technical debt issue dead, Andy explains, will not only save money in the midto-long term but will also bring about a permanent organisational paradigm-shift which will unlock untold benefits going forward. “It allows you to look at the way of working as an organisation and change the way you work, so that you become iterative in terms of how you develop applications. It is not the traditional waterfall with

Interviewee Bio

Andy Brierley Andy is a Vice President and Executive Partner, Cloud Application Modernization, Global Business Services at IBM.

consulting firm Accenture in 1987 where he worked as a manager for eight years.

A 20-year veteran of the company, Andy has delivered successful outcomes for a range of industry clients, working across many critical facets of IBMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business, including IT Systems Integration and Consulting, Strategic Outsourcing, and Global Business Services.

Andy holds a BSc in Computing Science and Computer Software Engineering from Lancaster University, where he is now a Member of the Deans Council and Honorary Teaching fellow.

When he isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t working at the cutting edge of cloud application modernisation, Before joining the IBM in 1999, he Andy can be found above spent four years as a business the clouds at 15,000ft. A keen applications consultant for a skydiver, he has recently News Corporation Subsidiary, completed his formation having started his career at skydiving certification.

one release per year – it is agile, with multiple releases – multiple releases a day,” Andy explains. “It changes the interaction between the development team and the operations team to become integrated in how you manage applications. “Modernising gives you the ability to re-write monolithic, single-code applications into individual containered elements, which enables you to address and change individual elements without changing the whole application itself. “You can do things more quickly, in a more agile manner, and if you do it correctly, you can change the way of working across your IT organisation and can solve technical debt forever. You no longer create technical debt because you are iteratively modernising, fixing, updating, and upgrading applications.”

Maximising Success Through Critical Partnerships IBM’s intimate understanding of cloud migration’s place as one of the most technically challenging and nuanced steps in the digital transformation journey has 18

“IBM’s ecosystem for cloud is extensive to ensure we deliver the right solution for our clients” Andy Brierley

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We have an extensive partner network and partner with big global cloud brandsâ&#x20AC;? Andy Brierley

prompted the firm to proactively build an effective partner network, adding capability and efficiency, while reducing cost and completion time. “We have an extensive partner network and partner with big global cloud brands,” Andy explains. “It is all about choosing the right outcome for our clients – everything we do is client-driven. I think it is really important to be agnostic and to listen. We have two ears and one mouth and try to use these proportionally to help solve our clients' issues, while providing as much honest advice as we can.”

integrated, pre-tested, optimised configurations for availability and business-agility to enable rapid deployment with incredible flexibility and scalability, supported by end-to-end services and maintenance. This partnership provides a host of solutions to address a variety of challenges across the cloud journey. Juniper Networks help address the big issue of cloud security by providing the ability to make secure and deploy global security standards across multiple interconnect private and public clouds.

A strong example of IBM’s collegiate approach can be found in the Cloud Infrastructure Alliance (CIA). A multi-vendor partnership, IBM has joined with industry leaders, VMware, Juniper and Lenovo, to deliver best-of-breed, on-premise hybrid cloud solutions in a move that constantly pushes the limits of digital transformation.

VMware software provides the cloud orchestration to manage multiple workloads across several cloud solutions.

The CIA’s open platforms not only support organisations with every step on their journey to the cloud, but also assist businesses’ engagement with clients while enhancing business outcomes. Clients gain highly secure, open technology cloud appliances, pre-

“IBM’s ecosystem for cloud is extensive to ensure we deliver the right solution for our clients,” Andy says.

Lenovo x86 servers, with their highest reliability ratings, deliver simple and cost-efficient hyperconverged platforms to achieve next-gen infrastructure.

“Take, for example, the value of the IBM-Citrix relationship in the context of enabling a hybrid cloud strategy. 21

The Citrix Workspace intelligent experience brings together all your applications, no matter where they are hosted (on-prem, private cloud, various public clouds, etc) into one simple interface for all end user devices. Add to this the integrations that Citrix has done with IBM’s other key ISV partners – Microsoft Azure and MVW, ServiceNow for an integrated ITSM experience, SaaS applications such as WorkDay, SalesForce, Concur & SAP – and you can understand how the Citrix Virtual Workspace is a key enabler of executing a hybrid cloud strategy. “And also, how we work with VMware, our goal is to provide customers the right cloud solution for their workload requirements. VMware customers are able to 'lift and shift' – and ultimately, transform – their environments on-premise onto the IBM Cloud without needing to refactor their applications and workloads. IBM and VMware’s commitment to hybrid and multicloud will allow companies to securely move, integrate and manage data, applications and services across and beyond the enterprise seamlessly.

“The Red Hat p have acquired level of abstra underlying clou you use it corre Andy Brierley

platform we provides a action from the ud platform if ectly”

“And finally, we work with NetApp to provide a wide range of data services that simplify the management of applications and data, and accelerate digital transformation.” IBM also recently doubled-down its commitment to delivering cloud integration with the acquisition of Raleigh, NC-headquartered hybrid cloud provider Red Hat for $34billion, announced in early July. The acquisition will offer IBM clients a never-before-seen hybrid multi-cloud platform, which will allow businesses to deploy, run and manage data and applications on-premise, as well as on private and multiple public clouds – all operating on opensource technology. “The Red Hat platform we have acquired provides a level of abstraction from the underlying cloud platform if you use it correctly,” Andy says. “It allows you to run applications in a harmonious way from your own data centre into a public cloud environment and gives you a level of agility between cloud platforms without having to rewrite applications themselves.” 23

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