Bridging the Technological Divide Between Two Worlds – The Journey to Becoming a Digital Enterprise

Many organisations who I come across in my day job have a common story. At a business leadership level, they have exciting aspirations around digital transformation and the possibilities that this could bring to their businesses. When considering what this really means, it’s all about innovation – It’s about how they build digital capabilities that differentiate them from their competition, allow them to disrupt their existing markets, and how they enter or create new ones. At its core, building these new digital capabilities is about developing software. Over a number of years, we’ve all heard many well-known organisations across all market verticals declare that they are becoming software companies. In fact, the CEO of one of my key enterprise customers made such a statement here. If this is the direction of travel, then once every player is a software company, the speed at which these companies can move innovative ideas from their best people to quality, production capabilities becomes a key competitive weapon. 

The practices, platforms and toolsets that should be adopted in order to enable this type of rapid software development required are widely documented. It’s also abundantly clear that for large enterprises that have existed for many years, it’s not just the challenge of navigating the associated organisational/cultural shift and adopting an entirely different technology landscape for this future state. There are additional challenges that new players and start-ups simply do not face - Enterprises have baggage - They have traditional applications that run their business today. They also have significant investment in assets like data centres and expensive infrastructure where these applications run. Whereas many start-ups are “born in the cloud”, where resources are delivered on-demand and generally requested via APIs as part of developer pipelines, many traditional enterprise applications are not fit to simply migrate to cloud. In many cases, to modify them in order to make them cloud-ready would be extremely time consuming, very expensive, and depending on the application and the role that it serves in the context of their business, may yield little real value to the business. 

However, Enterprises cannot afford to simply ignore these applications. They must continue running and managing them, in parallel to their efforts to adopt modern platforms and ways of working. Maintaining traditional platforms, skill sets, processes and ways of working alongside the next generation creates an enormous amount of complexity, and it’s no secret that this complexity carries significant cost - Cost that unfortunately takes budget away from the innovation that supports transforming towards a digital future. The other major challenge is that where speed is the objective, complexity is absolutely the enemy!

So, what can organisations do to ease this burden? That’s where VMware come in to help. VMware provide the software foundation that bridges these two worlds, running across traditional and modern cloud platforms. We provide abstraction between the two, allowing customers to bring the developer-friendly services and speed promised by the cloud to the data centre, and to take enterprise infrastructure-level resilience, security and control to the cloud. By standardising in this way, customers have ultimate control over application placement, and are able to build, run and manage their entire portfolio of applications in a consistent manner, regardless of the platform. All of this with minimised cost and complexity, and importantly, maximum speed!