New trends, new expectations
Consumer trends are setting new expectations for enterprise IT. Technology-driven services—from streaming music services to ride-sharing apps—have led consumers to expect immediate gratification. They know they can listen to a new song immediately; make an online purchase anywhere, anytime; and start using new software within minutes.
Consumers are also embracing pay-per-use services in high numbers. Those who continue to pay for subscriptions know they can cancel at any time. And they are likely to switch solutions quickly as their needs change.
IT groups have similar expectations for how their organizations consume technology resources. These IT groups want access to new technologies and solutions right away, without large capital expenditures and the extensive resource investments required by on-premises implementations. They want to avoid the cost of hiring new, specialized administrators to deploy and manage those technologies. In addition, they want a pay-per-use approach that lets them not only scale to meet rising demand but also contract—and reduce costs—when demand wanes. And they want to avoid lock-in, gaining the flexibility to change technologies as necessary.
At the same time, IT groups want to continue leveraging their existing investments and resources. They don’t want to retire existing systems that still deliver value. They don’t want to spend the time and money required to train skilled in-house staff on new technologies. And they don’t want to forfeit control over business-critical data.
IT groups can address their goals by bridging their existing systems to new cloud services. With the right cloud services, organizations can:
Accelerate innovation
How can subscription-based cloud services help your organization accelerate innovation?
- Rapid evaluations: You can quickly evaluate new technologies and develop new solutions, without a lengthy—or costly—deployment process. The infrastructure can be ready in minutes instead of hours, days, weeks or longer.
- Faster iterations: Cloud services let you fail fast and adjust your approach. Speedier, more frequent iterations help you produce better designs and applications.
- Low cost of failure: Because cloud services do not require large capital expenditures, you can minimize the cost of those fast failures. The cost of failure no longer restricts experimentation or innovation.
- Composable assets: The right cloud services can provide a set of integrated assets that enable developers and data scientists to easily bring together components and create tailored solutions.
- Access to data sets: Cloud services facilitate access to public data sets that enhance insights to drive innovation.
Improve IT economics
How can cloud services improve your IT economics?
- No large upfront investment: You can avoid the large, upfront capital expenditures required for on-premises deployments.
- Pay-as-you-go model: With cloud services, you can start small and buy only what you need, when you need it. You do not have to scope out sizing for the life of the solution.
- OpEx instead of CapEx: Shifting to monthly operational costs helps spread the costs of an infrastructure over the life of the technologies. The OpEx model can also reduce the need for CFO approval, enabling line-of-business teams to fund their own projects quickly and easily.
- Low operational costs: By capitalizing on managed cloud services, you no longer have to assign IT staff to basic configuration, administration, security, networking and availability tasks, which are handled by the cloud service provider. Instead, your staff can serve higher-value functions. Ultimately, your organization can spend less time and money running your infrastructure, and more time on innovation.
- Preserved investments: The right cloud services will help you preserve your existing investments in systems by allowing you to integrate those systems with the cloud environment.
Reduce risks
How can cloud services help reduce risks?
- Fewer skills required: Cloud service providers can offer deep expertise for configuring, managing, securing and maintaining availability. You can avoid the need to hire specially trained administrators, reducing the risks of using administrators whose skills (and focus) are stretched across numerous functions.
- Less testing: Deploying new solutions in-house can require months to test the theoretical capacity of those solutions and long iterative capacity-planning cycles. Cloud services eliminate that time and the risks inherent with those processes.
- Lower sunken costs: With cloud services, you experiment with new applications and technologies without large upfront—and irretrievable—investments. If something doesn’t work, you can abandon the project without large financial losses.
IBM Cloud: A bridge to the cloud, open for data
IBM can help you build a bridge to the cloud so you can capitalize on the power of subscription-based cloud services while continuing to leverage your existing investments.
Comprehensive portfolio: IBM offers more than 25 hybrid cloud services designed to help your developers and data scientists build new solutions and move data into the cloud. Several services help streamline the transition to the cloud by providing cloud-based capabilities for existing IBM solutions. For example:
IBM® DB2® on Cloud
- DB2 on Cloud offers the same functionality as on-premises versions of DB2, including compatibility with DB2 and Oracle SQL for easy migration of apps and tools to the cloud.
- IBM provisions and hosts the database for you in any of the 30+ IBM SoftLayer® data centers located around the world.
- Your DBAs control it, just as they do on-premises DB2 instances.
- Gain the agility of the cloud, including instant provisioning and monthly subscription billing.
IBM Bluemix® dashDB™
- IBM Bluemix dashDB is a cloud-based database, data warehousing and analytics
solution that:
- Facilitates rapid deployment of transactional workload systems and large-scale data warehouses
- Provides flexible options for volume and processing speed
- Uses a unified architecture that enables hybrid data processing between on-premises and cloud environments
- Capitalizes on in-database analytics to deliver robust performance
- Bluemix dashDB offers a bridge to the cloud for organizations that have invested in an IBM PureData® System for Analytics or IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration®.
IBM Cloud Analytics for Apache Hadoop
- IBM Cloud Analytics for Apache Hadoop combines Apache Spark and Hadoop with enterprise-grade capabilities, all running as a service on IBM SoftLayer infrastructure.
- Organizations can achieve the high performance they need for analyzing tremendous volumes of structured and unstructured data.
- Cloud Analytics for Apache Hadoop enables data to be shared and analyzed seamlessly among platforms, facilitating integration with SQL, NoSQL and other data types with Hadoop.
- Running Cloud Analytics for Apache Hadoop helps organizations accelerate deployment of big data analytics while avoiding capital expenditures and controlling ongoing operational costs.
IBM Bluemix Cloudant®
- Bluemix Cloudant is a managed NoSQL database service that moves application data closer to all the places it needs to be—enabling uninterrupted online and offline data access.
- Organizations can go to market faster and update apps without downtime.
- By moving data closer to users, Bluemix Cloudant supports responsive user experiences and helps ensure data continuously flows while enabling apps to scale elastically to support a growing number of global users.
- Importantly, Bluemix Cloudant provides data management expertise so organizations can focus their resources on development instead of database administration.
Curated open data: IBM facilitates access to more than 150 data sets through the new IBM Analytics Exchange. Integrate that data into analyses and applications to enhance insights and improve decision-making.
Integrated services: IBM provides built-in integration among open source and proprietary data services. Data can flow freely among different services to support the needs of data scientists, developers and business users. You could store data from mobile applications and replicate that data into an in-memory analytics service to deliver real-time insights.
Fully managed: IBM offers fully managed services, enabling you to stay open for business around the clock. Internal staff can focus on innovation instead of keeping the lights on.
Highly secure: IBM Cloud offerings draw on the extensive experience and expertise that has made IBM a long-standing leader in security, privacy and compliance. Security measures range from 24x7x365–staffed data centers and regular audits to ISO 27001 compliance and adaptive controls.
Data migration services: IBM offers multiple data migration services so you can match the service level with the data volume and environment you want to move to the cloud. Select from services geared toward small-volume database and Hadoop environments to services for massive data collections.
Delivering tangible results
IBM Cloud offerings help organizations across industries support innovation, control costs and reduce risks.
Marketing analytics firm
Cloud-based analytics help a marketing analytics firm stay ahead of competitors by delivering fast analytics results.
- Challenge: A marketing and loyalty analytics firm needed to accelerate campaign analytics performance to deliver more responsive service for its clients.
- Solution: IBM Campaign.
- Benefits: The new cloud-based solution from IBM delivers superior performance compared with the existing on-premises solution, enabling the firm to better meet client needs and maintain its competitive edge.
European on-demand car service
A startup turns to the cloud to avoid the costs and complexity of maintaining an in-house database.
- Challenge: This Uber-like service, which lets customers book vehicles and chauffeurs through a simple app, needed a scalable database solution that could support a rapidly growing business.
- Solution: IBM Bluemix Cloudant and IBM SoftLayer.
- Benefits: The company gained enterprise-class scale and performance at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining an in-house database. Developers can now focus on the core business, not database administration.
US auto manufacturer
One of the largest auto manufacturers taps into cloud capabilities to facilitate innovation.
- Challenge: To maintain a competitive edge, the auto manufacturer must continuously develop new technologies. For one project, the company wanted to create an in-car application to help drivers find the nearest open parking space.
- Solution: IBM Bluemix Cloudant advanced geospatial capabilities with IBM Cloud Analytics for Apache Hadoop and IBM Streams.
- Benefits: The company can test new solutions without the time and expense of deploying infrastructure. Integration allows the company to generate real-time insights from data—such as where drivers can find a free parking space—delivered by the Bluemix Cloudant database.
Grocery distribution
IBM Cloud solutions help expand transaction processing and data warehousing environments while utilizing existing skills.
- Challenge: A large retailer-owned grocery wholesaler needed to expand existing transaction processing and data warehouse environments without hiring additional personnel.
- Solution: IBM DB2 on IBM Cloud—initially for non-production test and development workloads.
- Benefits: The company can capitalize on the existing knowledge of its DBAs while ultimately extending systems to the cloud. Utilizing existing staff enables the company to maintain a high level of confidence and control over its data.
Create the bridge to the cloud with IBM
Cloud services provide a powerful way to meet the expectations of today’s IT groups. IBM Cloud offerings help build a bridge to the cloud through a broad portfolio of cloud services that facilitates integration with current systems and skills. With IBM Cloud, organizations can capitalize on the cloud and leverage existing investments to better support innovation, control costs and reduce risks.
Ready to learn more? Start here.
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