Skytap had a huge presence around IBM InterConnect this year. From our booth in the expo, to the party we threw with IBM at The House of Blues, it was great to talk with so many attendees about changing business needs, expectations, and the major challenges in software delivery today.
One challenge that we heard throughout the week was the struggle to maintain the speed and quality that customers—whether they be internal or external—demand that software is delivered. Cloud was obviously one of the week’s primary topics, but when your newer, born-in-the-cloud apps have dependencies on older, traditional or legacy applications that are housed on-premises, this can cause real constraints—especially around delivery speed. Lines of business may put all the pressure in the world on IT and development and test teams to deliver faster, but combatting bi-modal, or multi-modal IT can force organizations to choose between speed and quality, and neither should be sacrificed for the sake of the other.
Skytap CTO Brad Schick presented a session at InterConnect that addressed why application modernization is so vital today, and how organizations can get there—even with traditional applications that many haven’t considered for the cloud. These applications are often ruled out, due to most cloud providers requiring extensive refactoring or rewriting from scratch. But as Brad pointed out, not all clouds were built the same, and refactoring and rewriting isn’t a necessity to getting enterprise apps into the cloud. Cloud-driven technologies and processes can greatly improve the efficiency, agility, and scalability of existing enterprise software, and Skytap has a three-step process for achieving those gains.
By working to modernize your existing infrastructure before adopting new processes and architectures, key bottlenecks are removed—especially around shared, incomplete environments—that prevent “true” agility and DevOps from being reached. And while traditional applications may not have been originally built for the cloud, they don’t require years of effort and millions of dollars spent re-architecting just to make them compatible with clouds that weren’t built with these types of applications in mind.
Speaking of longstanding on-premises applications, Skytap also unveiled our newest product at InterConnect: AIX On-demand Instances. With this new release, IT can now lift and shift AIX to the cloud, enabling end-users to provision their own blended environments containing both x86 and AIX on Power Systems workloads in seconds.
This new solution drew huge interest in our booth, with many being beyond impressed at just how quickly sizable AIX instances could be templatized, cloned, and provisioned.
If you missed our AIX demo at IBM InterConnect, don’t worry! We recently unveiled this demo in our latest webinar, “The AIX Cloud Journey,” that’s now available for your on-demand enjoyment. Get a glimpse of the power that AIX running in Skytap provides!
Bryson Koehler, CTO for IBM Watson and IBM Cloud, said in a keynote during the show, “We here at IBM believe that cloud-native is your final destination.” Bryson added that public cloud—a multi-cloud approach in particular—provides capabilities like being able to rapidly design, deploy, maintain, and dispose of applications. This all adds up to what he described as “ultimate agility.”
We at Skytap agree with the endorsement of a multi-cloud strategy, especially when applying the benefits that cloud provides not just to greenfield applications, but also to complex, traditional enterprise workloads as well.
Interested in learning more about how Skytap makes cloud possible for enterprise applications? Click here for a custom demo tailored to your specific needs.
