Accelerating Digital Transformation with Software Defined Everything – SDx

Research from Gartner: What CIOs Need to Know About Software-Defined Infrastructure and Digital Business

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Software Defined Everything - SDx

About Wipro

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Research from Gartner

What CIOs Need to Know About Software-Defined Infrastructure and Digital Business

drive staff collaboration and contribution to enterprise strategy.

• Up-level your I&O staff through training and new hires. This will improve the design of your software-defined infrastructure across your facilities and third parties, including cloud providers. Don’t let aging infrastructure and lack of skill sets keep you from your digital ambitions.

Introduction

This document was revised on 3 August 2017. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

CIOs are investing in a transformation of their IT organization to deliver on leadership, innovation and agility. They are implementing bimodal work styles, and changing their operating model to become service- and/or value-optimized. They are also changing organizational models to break down silos and invest in relationship and product management competencies. Underlying these transformational capabilities is a fundamental change in the way applications and infrastructure systems are architected, built and run.

To deliver on digital business, top-performing enterprises are writing 30% more software than average-performing organizations in order to differentiate their businesses, exploit product leadership, customer intimacy and/or operational efficiency. New software is not being written as it was in the past. Rather, its static and monolithic sets of capabilities are giving way to becoming slimmer, dynamic, reusable, smarter and automated — as well as accessible by the outside world including customers, partners and ecosystems. Cloud as a style of computing is taking over from prior approaches (such as internet-based or client/server-based). In addition, analytics and other emerging technologies are enabling a new and faster way to develop software.

At the same time, CIOs are recognizing their limits on talent, capacity and resources in a time of immense opportunity for digital business. They are outsourcing more commodity

CIOs need to cut through the marketing hype to identify which technologies can deliver on digital business. This research explains why and where SDI is required for digital business, and how to leverage a bimodal work style to implement it.

Key Challenges

• CIOs can’t deliver on digital business by doing everything the same way they always have. The past was defined by slowness; the future will be defined by speed, agility and innovation.

• I&O are some of the slowest processes to change, driven in part by legacy architectures and a customization mindset.

• The fast pace of new and emerging information and technology capabilities challenge CIOs to be proactive in evaluating and exploiting them for business benefit.

• CIOs are challenged to design infrastructure capabilities to meet business strategy in a holistic manner, rather than an architecture that is piecemealed together based on bottom-up needs.

Recommendations

CIOs responsible for design of bimodal should:

• Continuously optimize your software development processes through IaaS and PaaS technical services product managers. These managers will exploit new market functionality as it becomes available and manage ongoing requirements driven by business strategy and teams.

• Think about your digital platform in layers; for example, infrastructure and platform layers underneath application layers. Use Mode 2 methods to design each layer holistically to get the flexibility and speed you need for digital business.

• Train all IT staff on your business and industry so they can see the value chain and their impact on the enterprise strategy. Longer term, develop metrics and performance incentives that are more business-centric to

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functions including using more SaaS, in part to optimize their internal staff to focus on what can differentiate the business. In addition, they are exploiting more public cloud IaaS and PaaS to write new software, instead of reflexively investing internally in data centers and infrastructure. In short, CIOs realize they can’t do everything the same way they have in the past, and wish to exploit all avenues of opportunities to deliver on the promise of digital business. The past was defined by slowness; the future by speed, agility and innovation.

Underlying these systems and architectures are automation capabilities that often come with confusing “technospeak” (including software-defined, DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery [CI/CD; see Note 1], application program interfaces [APIs], mediated APIs and more). This research seeks to stem confusion on technospeak, specifically in the area of software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and software-defined data center (SDDC). It will help CIOs understand what these terms mean, why and when they are needed, and how to think about the decision for investing in them. CIOs who have invested in enterprise architecture (EA), will be able to better strategize and collaborate with EA on the justification for strategic technology investments necessary to achieve agility and efficiency and tie them to strategic outcomes.

Analysis

Modernize System Architectures to Increase SpeedFigure 1 shows modern software and hardware architectures, and how they are accessed by users, developers, customers, partners and ecosystems as well as through programmable integration. Making application functionality/services callable and programmable increases the speed by which new application capabilities are delivered. They leverage existing capabilities rather than duplicate it and waste valuable time and effort. Thus, modern applications are composable from existing capabilities with new differentiated capabilities that are additive.

These application services are enabled through mediated APIs.This basically means that there is a mediation or an abstraction layer between the API called and the API behind the functionality consumed. The benefit of mediation is easier change to API functionality without requiring changes in all dependent callers of that API. The mediation layer takes care of the mapping and any translation required. In addition, the mediation layer manages and controls the

interaction between the client and the service, to enforce security and operational policies. Thus, the mediation layer makes it safe and manageable to enable programmability and reusability, increasing productivity of development teams and corresponding time-to-market of functionality.

The same is true for platform and infrastructure services. When new application capabilities are required, rather than evaluate new platforms and infrastructure each time, a modern approach leverages standardized platform and infrastructure capabilities. This results in increased speed of delivery, as well as in policy enforcement and compliance to assure that speed doesn’t compromise safety, operational controls and security.

Mediated APIs can be used either through a user interface or through programmable means to enable access to these platform and infrastructure services. The technical service (nonapplication) based mediated APIs and associated functionality underlying the platform services are called software-defined infrastructure (SDI). An SDI is an architectural approach to orchestrating IT infrastructure and facilities inside the data center (yours or outsourced) and outside the data center in the larger sphere of devices and machine interfaces critical to the Internet of Things (IoT) and IT/OT. SDI delivers business value such as speed to market, increased automation (like CI/CD) and greater employee productivity.

As a result of time-to-market and agility benefits, all modern software architectures are using both mediated APIs and SDI capabilities. The challenge for CIOs is to design the SDI platform to meet the requirements of newly built applications today and into the future. This is especially difficult for existing homegrown internal infrastructure that does not have software-defined capabilities. Some portions of the infrastructure may have to be replaced. Application development and operations may have to move to public cloud services in order to get the SDI capabilities that enable agility, reuse and time-to-market advantages.

Use Product Management to Ensure the Right Set of Mediated APIs for Delivery TeamsWhen architects and service delivery leaders assess and design the solution delivery processes, they make decisions on the engineering processes and what to expose to the service delivery teams. Some organizations choose to

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Source: Gartner (July 2017)

FIGURE 1 Access to Application, Platform and Infrastructure Capabilities via Mediated APIs

primarily expose the platform services to service delivery teams. This enables the teams to work at a higher level of abstraction, and therefore be more productive, while also shielding them from underlying infrastructure capabilities and policies. Others directly expose the infrastructure capabilities to the service delivery teams for use in a repeatable manner that automatically enforces policies (for example, for resiliency, data locality and security). Most enterprises will leverage both approaches, depending on the requirements of the applications being developed.

Whatever the choice of platform and/or infrastructure services, a new, more proactive way of thinking about the design of end-to-end development processes is required. This includes a continuous focus on new development requirements, and ways to continuously streamline and optimize the processes.

IT organizations should not rely on a static set of development processes. New development capabilities come on the market all the time. Those need to be evaluated against the overall business strategy and investments for differentiation, as well as for team requirements and experiences. As a result, establishing development processes should not be seen as a project, but as an ongoing set of processes that need to be continually optimized. These processes need an overseer that manages and optimizes those processes. In short, they will need to use product management techniques to continually evolve the development processes, inclusive of the platform and infrastructure capabilities.

As CIOs or their delegates in architecture and service delivery develop these processes, they will use a cloud style of computing.This both enables and encourages reuse and automation to achieve speed and agility. As a result, they will make decisions on what IaaS platforms to use for infrastructure services and what PaaS platforms to use for platform services. Product managers of IaaS and PaaS technical services will need to:

• Be in place as overseers of the development processes.

• Continuously learn about new capabilities in the market that could be leveraged for business benefit.

• Understand new and emerging requirements from both the business strategy and development teams perspectives.

As a result of these efforts, the IaaS and PaaS platforms will evolve to meet ongoing needs, while balancing the productivity of the teams and the safety, compliance and security of the capabilities offered.

Recommendations:

CIOs should:

• Map out your current application development and delivery processes. Assess infrastructure and platform services on the basis of overall speed of delivery, levels of reuse, effectiveness of policy enforcement and levels

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of automation versus manual processing. Determine weak points and initiate improvements in collaboration with EA and service delivery product management.

• Develop and document your cloud strategy inclusive of enterprise guardrails and IaaS and PaaS capabilities, with guidelines on when to exploit private versus public cloud capabilities (see Gartner Recommended Reading section).

• Employ product managers for IaaS and PaaS technical services, to manage ongoing requirements driven by business strategy and teams, as well as to exploit market opportunities that become available.

Invest in Platforms Enabled by SDI

Gartner has defined the five components of the digital business platform on top of which differentiation and innovation is built (see Figure 2). Enabling access to these platforms are mediated APIs that can be used either through a user interface or through programmable means.

At the heart of modern application and infrastructure architectures is the concept of SDI (also called mediated APIs). Every organization pursuing digital business must have SDI, to deliver:

• Speed to market for software and digital products/services

• Increased automation (like CI/CD) for both speed and cost optimization

• Greater employee productivity

SDI capabilities make access to the infrastructure, facilities and IoT devices both programmable and conforming to security and management policies. SDI capabilities and policies are configured by IoT and infrastructure engineering staff, and directed by technical services product managers. For example, selected configurations could implement data locality rules, resiliency rules and backup rules, all enabled through policy. That way development teams can focus on business logic, not infrastructure logic. These policies and configurations transcend the decision of whether to own the platform or acquire it elsewhere (such as through public cloud computing or through software/hardware acquisition in your own data center). Either way, these policies need to be defined and enforced by technical service product managers (for example, for IoT, IaaS and PaaS) and automated through the service delivery platform team(s).

SDI capabilities can also be used to gain greater productivity through automation of underlying processes that occur in your internal data centers. For example, SDI-based automation can be used to:

• Add infrastructure capacity to the private cloud

• Automatically configure infrastructure when it is delivered to the data center

• Optimize asset utilization through load balancing rules and policies

SDI can also be used across internal and external (cloud-based) data centers (for example, to add more capacity to an application that has exhausted its internal capacity).

A general recommendation that has stood the test of time for external service providers is anything that is done more than once should be done through automation. Too often, however, IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) personnel lack an understanding of the overarching business and technical architecture and dependencies. Hence, rarely do these capabilities get the attention they should, either in design or in development. As a result, I&O staff appear to be stuck in the old, stodgy world of slowness, when in fact process is only part of the problem.

The greater problem is a lack of thought on overall strategy and design for infrastructure in light of the business strategy, as opposed to an architecture that is piecemealed together based on bottom-up needs. Fifty-seven percent of CEOs focused on reinternalizing IT and digital capabilities because of its importance to competitive advantage. Now is the time for CIOs to invest in the right architectures at each layer, including infrastructure, platform and application. Only then will they achieve the speed and agility expected for digital business.

This requires a translation of top-down strategy, all the way down to platform and infrastructure requirements. We recommend that EA and multidisciplinary resources inclusive of I&O turn strategy into platform requirements in part through Mode 2 methods. Some requirements will be clear; others will be unknown. Methods that will aid in getting the flexibility, if not the complete functionality, needed out of a platform include:

• Working with startups

• Going on field trips to visit digital leaders

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Source: Gartner (July 2017)

FIGURE 5 Five Elements Make Up the Digital Business Platform

• Running ideation and scenario planning workshops to imagine the future

CIOs are challenged to sell these technical platform capabilities that enable the business to drive their digital ambitions, innovate and differentiate, and drive faster time-to-market. To achieve these benefits, an investment must be made into SDI and mediated API platforms that are the enablers of this value. CIOs should work with their EA teams to develop an investment strategy, and sell it to senior business executives and board of directors based on the business value provided. Unfortunately, the underpinnings of digital business value are often complicated and hard to understand for nontechnology executives. Translation in business terms is a requirement.

Recommendations:

CIOs should:

• Invest in EA to develop software-defined infrastructure platforms that are driven by top-down business strategy.

• Utilize Mode 2 methods such as working with startups and experimenting with new technologies and services to assess new platform architectures. You may need to invest in developing or extending some capabilities that are not available on the open market, which may require new or enhanced skills.

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• Sell the business value of these investments by linking them to digital business execution.

• Develop new product management roles for each platform — IoT, IaaS, PaaS — to be sure that new capabilities and business requirements are continually assessed, in light of both evolving strategy and desired process optimizations.

• Increase business and industry training of IT staff so they can see the value chain and their impact in the enterprise strategy. Longer term, develop metrics that are more business-centric to drive their collaboration and contribution to enterprise strategy.

• Up-level your I&O staff through both training and new hires to better enable the right design of your SDI across your facilities and third parties, including cloud providers. Don’t let aging infrastructure and lacking skill set keep you from your digital ambitions.

• Define a set of repeatable infrastructure, security and management capabilities that can be instantiated in software (such as availability, performance, security, protection and provisioning) and leveraged by the applications teams.

Note 1. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Continuous integration is the practice of integrating, building, testing and delivering functional software on a scheduled, repeatable and automated basis. Continuous delivery takes the automation and operational readiness many steps further — first deploying the software to a test environment, then initiating deeper testing at the system level. Software may promote to various levels, such as system test or user acceptance test (UAT). The entire process is automated, dramatically compressing the time from development to production release. Companies may take this all the way out to continuous deployment, in which changes flow through the pipeline all the way to production. The key is small changes, and the application relies on a cloud infrastructure and automation to roll out dynamic deployments against a shared infrastructure.

Source: Gartner Research Note G00325934, Donna Scott Dave Russell, 10 July 2017

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Accelerating Digital Transformation with Software De-fined Everything - SDx

Digital transformation is critical to deliver enhanced customer experience for the digital natives. It means delivering unified customer experience across web, mobile application, brick and mortar facility and social media. Businesses also leverage large volumes of data generated by various channels to create new opportunities and improve existing business process. However, for delivering differentiated business offerings and enhanced business capabilities, agile and adaptive next-gen IT which helps accelerate business is imperative. Software-defined everything (SDx) is about how the entire IT silos of applications, servers, storage, network, data centers can be abstracted, automated and orchestrated through software. It is critical to design every layer of infrastructure and platform solution, which can deliver adaptability, speed, and flexibility for digital business.

Wipro’s next-generation IT architecture powered by SDx provides agile and adaptive IT platform throughout the digital business process. In addition, it delivers connected, integrated and cumulative digital experience for business stakeholders.

SDx Management Engine - Unified Orchestrator

SDx management engine is the unified orchestrator and single pane of glass integrating multi cloud management and software defined infrastructure. Wipro has invested in creating connectors and plugins for software defined infrastructure, container solution to this control layer. It integrates with new age automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible and release orchestration tools for DevOps and lifecycle automation. It supports cloud-native application design while providing a platform for delivering traditional and new age applications in hybrid cloud.

Wipro ASPIRE platform

Wipro’s automation platform ASPIRE can deliver hyper-automation to drive standardization, compliance, and transformation. It also sets and delivers policy driven standardization for availability, performance, security,

data protection and end-to-end infra and app provisioning process. ASPIRE delivers consumption based just in time build services for the digital ecosystem of IT.

Service Theater

Service theatre delivers API mediation layer, which exposes northbound services, and service catalogs for self-service. API mediation helps provide an expansive platform to leverage existing and new differentiated infrastructure capabilities and drive accelerated innovation, agility and time to market. Wipro’s Service Theatre (see figure.2) standardizes and delivers flexible northbound services for variety of infrastructure solutions. For example, it mediates storage, data protection and data management services with on premise or cloud based infrastructure services to be consumed by variety of solutions such as private cloud and bare metal servers. This platform leverages advanced abstracted operations, automation and granular telemetry with reporting and chargeback to deliver consumption based managed services. It gives an opportunity to leverage bleeding edge new technologies adoption along with existing investment.

SDx – Infrastructure Layer – Reimagining the Core

SDx delivers an agile and programmable infrastructure platform to deliver everything as a service in a bimodal architecture. It leverages hyper converged infrastructure and rack scale design for delivering hyper scale IT and software defined infra building blocks such as storage, compute, network, WAN and API mediated control layer to deliver value based standardized services.

For faster and innovative software roll out with agile methodologies, one needs tightly integrated platforms and infrastructure to enable the same. Tight integration of programmable infrastructure (infrastructure as a code) of SDx with CI/CD process leverages the best of both worlds (public cloud, on premise solution and container microservices) as per role based and identity aligned access.

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Source: Wipro

FIGURE 1 Wipro’s Service Theatre

Cloud Computing with SDx

SDx platform natively delivers hybrid cloud computing to applications. SDx building blocks such as compute, storage and network are delivered on-premise or in a public cloud of your choice in a truly hybrid and homogeneous infrastructure. For example, storage on premise can natively replicate to same storage in public cloud. This is true for data protection and hyper-converged instances. The hybrid IaaS and PaaS offerings of SDx platform deliver the required infrastructure and platform agility to business in a consumption model.

Wipro’s SDx Innovation Center and IT Lifecycle Services

Wipro has invested in a state of the art SDx innovation and excellence center. With enterprise grade innovation center investment, Wipro has

carried out detailed integration and testing of many disruptive startup products for SDx platform in enterprise eco-system. Clients can leverage this interoperable, tested, engineered and certified architecture for delivering IT transformation. They can either adopt the top down architecture or specific building blocks.

Wipro’s SDx consulting exercise can help clients evaluate the target reference architecture and roadmap for their digital business. Wipro’s consulting team works with the client’s enterprise architecture team to jointly define and develop business centric metrics and measurement criteria to align to enterprise strategy.

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Success StorySDx has been successfully deployed in various industry sectors and has delivered strong results in improving time to market and a cost effective consumption based model. Here are some success stories

• A leading semiconductor client enhanced application performance by 3x with 10x improved time to market and 30% reduction in TCO.

• A leading departmental retail chain leveraged DevOps solution based on SDx to cut efforts by 90-95% and application deployment time from months to under-a-week.

Source: Wipro

FIGURE 2 Wipro’s SDx services

• UK based government organization leveraged SDx hyper scale solution to deliver IT and digital transformation for the council. It delivered end user experience with carbon clever program and 40% reduction in overall IT expenses.

Source: Wipro

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About Wipro

Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 160,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future.

Email: info@wipro.com

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