Are Legacy Apps Slowing IT Transformation?

Sometimes it really does help to talk things over.

Reflecting on my recent interview on The Cube with John Furrier, Co-CEO SiliconANGLE Media and Dave Vellante, Founder of Wikibon, I’ve been able to do a bit more of what they would say is “extracting the signal from the noise.”

In this blog, I’ll build on our conversation, expanding on a proven, practical way to help get IT Transformation and cloud initiatives “unstuck.”

Reality check from real customers

John and Dave were asking me about The State of IT Transformation report, which EMC recently published. The report analyzes customer data provided by CIOs and their direct reports who participated in 660 one-on-one IT Transformation Workshop sessions conducted by EMC or VMware.

Unlike reports based on surveys or random samples, the data comes from senior leadership teams in the midst of IT transformation—or, as John put it, from people “trying to figure out their future—so they’re very engaged, sharing a lot of inside information about what they’re trying to do.”

Everybody gets it… they just can’t get there

The workshops help enterprises benchmark themselves against competitors in four areas: infrastructure, applications, operating model, and service strategy.

Based on analysis of the data of where organizations say they want to be, it’s clear that everybody understands the need for transformation across all four dimensions. On the other hand, based on where the vast majority of organizations say they are today, there’s still a long way to go.

Bogged down in applications

Since the interview, I’ve thought more about how moving to cloud requires coordination of many moving parts, most notably the applications that the business depends on—those running on existing infrastructure in what John calls the “engine room” of business operations.

Many transformation initiatives bog down when trying to get a handle on an applications portfolio that has grown over time, spans multiple business units, and often has ingested applications from a merger or acquisition.

Without a clear understanding of existing applications—their role in the business and their technical requirements—it is difficult to move forward with confidence. For example, how do you determine the right target on-prem private cloud infrastructure? How do you determine which applications are suitable for public cloud?

Lack of an accurate application inventory and understanding of application-to-application and application-to-infrastructure interdependencies make transformation teams rightly wary, due to risk of business impact.

One of the areas we probe in our workshops is the current state of application assessment and rationalization. And one of the stats from the report that Dave called out in the interview is “90% of the folks that went to a workshop have no way to evaluate which workloads are suitable to move to hybrid cloud.”

It’s true. Other than, perhaps, moving dev/test to public cloud, most organizations are stuck when it comes to figuring out which workloads are best suited for which types of private, hybrid, or public cloud.

Unique workload-centric approach

My favorite part of The Cube interview comes next, when Dave asks, “So what do they do, they call you?”

In short, the answer is yes.

That’s because EMC has developed an iterative, data-driven, automated workload-centric application discovery and analysis capability that is truly unique.

Our services leverage automated tools and big data engines to discover and analyze applications and workloads very quickly. As a result, enterprises can gain a complete and accurate application inventory—and evaluate each application, based on their own business requirement criteria. In addition, our service tools can generate “blueprints” that map all application and infrastructure interdependencies

As a result, IT transformation teams can move forward with confidence, making informed decisions about:

• Application portfolio rationalization – Quickly identify and retire unused and duplicate applications to reduce cost, risk, and complexity—as well as zero in on the applications where modernization and migration will deliver the greatest business impact
• Target cloud environments – Design and build the appropriate private/hybrid cloud platform and assess public cloud services
• Cloud suitability – Determine which workloads are best suited for different kinds of private, public, and hybrid clouds, reducing the time and effort it takes to evaluate applications for cloud deployment by 50-70%
• Migration planning and execution – Apply application migration bundling and scheduling analyses to develop migration strategies—and build the “factories” for repeatable application modernization and migration

Gaining insight into existing applications to accelerate IT transformation is definitely a subject worth discussing.

Talking it over could really help!

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