While EMC World conversations naturally tend to focus on infrastructure, one early surprise this year is the amount of buzz around the topic of applications. What’s driving the interest? My sense is that there are two major factors.
First, as enterprises gain comfort with public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure models, attention is naturally turning towards how to best use these platforms to transform their application portfolios. CIOs are now more familiar and comfortable with the cloud model and want to figure out how to best use it at scale.
Second, competitive pressures are forcing enterprises to bring new apps to market faster as software continues to ”eat the world.” This also means that CIOs need to figure out how to best use cloud platforms to unlock IP value in legacy applications through modernization.
Facing portfolios that number in the thousands, enterprises are recognizing they need to get application modernization efforts underway… fast.
The Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud helps address three major challenges facing organizations seeking to modernize application portfolios through rewriting or replatforming apps for the cloud. How?
- Provide Self-serve Access. Application teams want to accelerate and streamline efforts associated with rewriting legacy apps for new cloud models and microservices architectures, while also eliminating proliferation of ”one-off” environments. The Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud provides development teams with self-serve access to service blueprints for common software stacks and environments. Standardized blueprints for IaaS, PaaS, or DBaaS can be developed to eliminate the need for developers to spend time and effort configuring and deploying environments. It’s not just developers, but also end users that want self-serve access to applications and resources. The Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is designed to enable an IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) operating model, enabling enterprises to deliver an Application-as-a-Service (AaaS) model for Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, or even custom enterprise apps.
- Match the App to the Cloud. Existing application workloads are best suited for public, private or hybrid cloud models based on variety of business, technical, and operational factors. The Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud provides the platforms as well as the management and orchestration capabilities required to match application workloads with the best-fit cloud model.
- Scale out to the Public Cloud. By providing extensibility to vCloudAir, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, EMC-powered cloud service providers and other public cloud service providers, the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud also provides the ability to migrate application workloads to the most appropriate service provider over time.
While the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud provides the platform and foundation for application portfolio modernization, the EMC Global Professional Services organization provides complementary services to help enterprises:
- Develop an overall application portfolio modernization strategy to take advantage of cloud, PaaS and microservices
- Define an overall business case and roadmap for application modernization
- Rewrite or replatform applications for public, private, and hybrid cloud models
It truly is an exciting time in the world of apps. Contact us or follow @sbils for updates this week and to learn more about how we can help.
