Digital Platform Conductor tools – an innovative solution to the complexity crisis
Accelerated digital transformation is driving increasingly complex and distributed digital infrastructures; across on-premises, private cloud and public cloud platforms. The reality is that most organisations find themselves in this ‘hybrid reality’ – and will continue to do so for some time to come.
Organisations are investing significant amounts of money into building modern dynamic hybrid infrastructures, but with no strategy or ability to have that ‘joined up view’ as to how they will support and manage their applications and workloads against potentially complex backdrops.
A recent Gartner report ‘Innovation Insight for Digital Platform Conductor Tools’ highlights this challenge and recognises that to manage a hybrid infrastructure with a workload/application view requires an innovative new toolset – something which they are categorising as ‘Digital Platform Conductor tools’ (DPC). The report names Cloudsoft as a representative vendor for this innovative class of tool.
So what actually is a Digital Platform Conductor tool?
At the highest level – Gartner’s view is that a Digital Platform Conductor Tool will manage hybrid portfolios, operating across both on-premises and external environments, brokering the mix of services required to support application workloads, while driving down costs and ultimately reducing risks. It’s like a ’smart super glue’ that offers a unified view of technologies and their connection to applications, enabling the automation of workloads ‘at the right time, using the right technology, in the right location, for the right price’.
Gartner brings this thinking to life with a powerful ‘conductor’ analogy… they believe DCT tools should act as;
• an ‘orchestra conductor’ – providing holistic visualisations of digital platform performance;
• an ‘electrical conductor’ – ensuring intelligent flow of application workloads across distributed hybrid platforms’
• and last but not least, a ’train conductor’ – ensuring business rules and processes are followed and that efforts are all moving in the same direction across all technology architectures.
The beauty of this approach is that in many ways it renders the infrastructure invisible – and brings a ‘public cloud’ type experience to complex hybrid architectures – something previously not thought possible! It goes beyond any notions of intelligent infrastructure, making top down automated application management the goal. Gartner Analyst, Roger Williams’ blog ‘Digital Platform Conductor Tools – A New Term For What I & O Leaders Need Now’ talks about this in more detail.
Blog Authored by: Cloudsoft
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