This document provides a summary of a podcast discussion between Dana Gardner and Doug de Werd about the evolution of IT management. Some key points: - IT management has evolved over 30 years from managing heterogeneity to now managing complexity across hybrid cloud, multicloud, and SaaS environments. - Automation is getting a boost from new ML and AI capabilities like AIOps, just as multicloud deployments increase demands. - HPE OneView provides a core infrastructure management solution that is extending its capabilities through partnerships to integrate with DevOps tools and cloud platforms. - Intelligence from tools like HPE InfoSight is providing more insights and enabling more autonomous computing models that can self-optimize

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The Long Road of IT Systems
Management Enters the Domain of
AIOps-Fueled Automation Over
Hybrid and Multicloud Complexity
A discussion on how IT management technologies and methods have evolved to optimize and
automate workloads to exacting performances and cost requirements.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Innovator podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into
hybrid IT management.
IT operators have for decades been playing catch-up to managing their systems amid
successive waves of heterogeneity, complexity, and changing deployment models. IT
management technologies and methods have evolved right along with the challenge,
culminating in the capability to optimize and automate workloads to exacting
performance and cost requirements.
Automation is about to get an AIOps boost from new machine learning (ML) and artificial
intelligence (AI) capabilities -- just as multicloud deployments become more demanding.
Stay with us as we explore the past, present, and future of IT management innovation
with a 30-year veteran of IT management, Doug de Werd, Senior Product Manager for
Infrastructure Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Welcome, Doug.
Doug de Werd: Thanks, Dana. I’m glad to be here.
Gardner: Management in enterprise IT has for me been
about taking heterogeneity and taming it, bringing varied
and dynamic systems to a place where people can
operate over more, using less. And that’s been a 30-year
journey.
Yet heterogeneity these days, Doug, includes so much
more than it used to. We’re not just talking about
platforms and frameworks – we’re talking about hybrid
cloud, multicloud, and many Software as a service
(SaaS) applications. It includes working securely across
de Werd

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organizational boundaries with partners and integrating business processes in ways that
never have happened before.
With all of that new complexity, with an emphasis on intelligent automation, where do
you see IT management going next?
Managing management
de Werd: Heterogeneity is known by another term, and that’s chaos. In trying to move
from the traditional silos and tools to more agile, flexible things, IT management is all
about your applications -- human resources and finance, for example – that run the core
of your business. There’s also software development and other internal things. The
models for those can be very different and trying to do that in a single manner is difficult
because you have widely varying endpoints.
Gardner: Sounds like we are now about managing the management.
de Werd: Exactly. Trying to figure out how to do that in an efficient and economically
feasible way is a big challenge.
Gardner: I have been watching the IT management space for 20-plus years and every
time you think you get to the point where you have managed everything that needs to be
managed -- something new comes along. It’s a continuous journey and process.
But now we are bringing intelligence and automation to the problem. Will we ever get to
the point where management becomes subsumed or invisible?
de Werd: You can automate tasks, but you can’t
automate people. And you can’t automate
internal politics and budgets and things like that.
What you do is automate to provide flexibility.
But it’s not just the technology, it’s the economics and it’s the people. By putting that all
together, it becomes a balancing act to make sure you have the right people in the right
places in the right organizations. You can automate, but it’s still within the context of that
broader picture.
How to Support Your DevOps, Automation,
And IT Management Initiatives
Gardner: When it comes to IT management, you need a common framework. For HPE,
HPE OneView has been core. Where does HPE OneView go from here? How should
people think about the technology of management that also helps with those political and
economic issues?
You can automate tasks, but
you can’t automate people.

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de Werd: HPE OneView is just an outstanding core infrastructure management solution,
but it’s kind of like a car. You can have a great engine, but you still have to have all the
other pieces.
And so part of what we are trying to do with HPE OneView, and we have been very
successful, is extending that capability out into other tools that people use. This can be
into more traditional tools like with our Microsoft or VMware partnerships and exposing
and bringing HPE OneView functionality into traditional things.
But it also has a lot to do with DevOps and the continuous integration development types
of things with Docker, Chef, and Puppet -- the whole slew of at least 30 partners we
have.
That integration allows the confidence of using HPE OneView as a core engine. All
those other pieces can still be customized to do what you need to do -- yet you still have
that underlying core foundation of HPE OneView.
Gardner: And now with HPE increasingly going to an as-a-service orientation across
many products, how does management-as-a-service work?
Creativity in the cloud
de Werd: It’s an interesting question, because part of management in the traditional
sense -- where you have a data center full of servers with fault management or break/fix
such as a hard-drive failure detection – is you want to be close, you want to have that
notification immediately.
As you start going up in the cloud with deployments, you have connectivity issues, you
have latency issues, so it becomes a little bit trickier. When you have more up levels, up
the stack, where you have software that can be more flexible -- you can do more
coordination. Then the cloud makes a lot of sense.
Management in the cloud can mean a
lot of things. If it’s the infrastructure,
you tend to want to be closer to the
infrastructure, but not exclusively. So,
there’s a lot of room for creativity.
Gardner: Speaking of creativity, how do you see people innovating both within HPE and
within your installed base of users? How do people innovate with management now that
it’s both on- and off-premises? It seems to me that there is an awful lot you could do with
management beyond red-light, green-light, and seek out those optimization and
efficiency goals. Where is the innovation happening now with IT management?
de Werd: The foundation of it begins with automation, because if you can automate you
become repeatable, consistent, and reliable, and those are all good in your data center.
Management in the cloud can mean a
lot of things. If it’s the infrastructure, you
tend to want to be closer to the
infrastructure, but not exclusively.

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You can free up your IT staff to do other things. The truth is if you can do that reliably,
you can spend more time innovating and looking at your problems from a different angle.
You gain the confidence that the automation is giving you.
Automation drives creativity in a lot of different ways. You can be faster to market, have
quicker releases, those types of things. I think automation is the key.
Gardner: Any examples? I know sometimes you can’t name customers, but can you
think of instances where people are innovating with management in ways that would
illustrate its potential?
Automation innovation
de Werd: There’s a large biotech genome sequencing company, an IT group that is
very innovative. They can change their configuration on the fly based on what they want
to do. They can flex their capacity up and down based on a task -- how much compute
and storage they need. They have a very flexible way of doing that. They have it all
automated, all scripted. They can turn on a dime, even as a very large IT organization.
And they have had some pretty impressive ways of repurposing their IT. Today we are
doing X and tonight we are doing Y. They can repurpose that literally in minutes --
versus days for traditional tasks.
Gardner: Are your customers also innovating in ways that allow them to get a common
view across the entire lifecycle of IT? I’m thinking from requirements, through
development, deployment, test, and continuous redeployment.
Transform Compute, Storage, and Networking
Into Software-Defined Infrastructure
de Werd: Yes, they can string all of these processes together using different partner
tools, yet at the core they use HPE OneView and HPE Synergy underneath the covers
to provide that real, raw engine.
By using the HPE partner ecosystem integrated with HPE OneView, they have that
visibility. Then they can get into things like Docker Swarm. It may not be HPE OneView
providing that total visibility. At the hardware and infrastructure level it is, but because we
are feeding into upper-level and broader applications, they can see what’s going on and
determine how to adjust to meet the needs across the entire business process.
Gardner: In terms of HPE Synergy and composability, what’s the relationship between
composability and IT management? Are people making the whole greater than the sum
of the parts with those?

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de Werd: They are trying to. I think there is still a learning curve. Traditional IT has been
around a long time. It just takes a while to change the mentality, skills sets, and internal
politics. It takes a while to get to that point of saying, “Yeah, this is a good way to go.”
But once they dip their toes into the water and see the benefits -- the power, flexibility,
and ease of it -- they are like, “Wow, this is really good.” One step leads to the next and
pretty soon they are well on their way on their composable journey.
Gardner: We now see more intelligence brought to management products. I am thinking
about how HPE InfoSight is being extended across more storage and server products.
We used to access log feeds from different IT products and servers. Then we had
agents and agent-less analysis for IT management. But now we have intelligence as a
service, if you will, and new levels of insight. How will HPE OneView evolve with this
new level of increasingly pervasive intelligence?
How to Eliminate Complex Manual Processes and
Increase the Speed of IT Service Delivery
de Werd: HPE InfoSight is a great example. You see it being used in multiple ways,
things like taking the human element out, things like customer advisories coming out and
saying, “Such-and-such product has a problem,” and how that affects other products.
If you are sitting there looking at 1,000 or 5,000 servers in your data center, you’re
wondering how I am affected by this? There are still a lot of manual spreadsheets out
there, and you may find yourself pouring through a list.
Today, you have the capability of getting an [intelligent alert] that says, “These are the
ones that are affected. Here is what you should do. Do you want us to go fix it right
now?” That’s just an example of what you can do.
It makes you more efficient. You begin to understand how you are using your resources,
where your utilization is, and how you can then optimize that. Depending on how flexible
you want to be, you can design your systems to respond to those inputs and
automatically flex [deployments] to the places that you want to be.
This leads to autonomous computing. We are not
quite there yet, but we are certainly going in that
direction. You will be able to respond to different
compute, storage, and network requirements and
adjust on the fly. There will also be self-healing and
self-morphing into a continuous optimization model.
Gardner: And, of course, that is a big challenge these days … hybrid cloud, hybrid IT,
and deploying across on-premises cloud, public cloud, and multicloud models. People
know where they want to go with that, but they don’t know how to get there.
We are not quite there [with
autonomous computing]
yet, but we are certainly
going in that direction.

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How does modern IT management help them achieve what you’ve described across an
increasingly hybrid environment?
Manage from the cloud down
de Werd: They need to understand what their goals are first. Just running virtual
machines (VMs) in the cloud isn’t really where they want to be. That was the initial thing.
There are economic considerations involved in the cloud, CAPEX and OPEX arguments.
Simply moving your infrastructure from on-premises up into the cloud isn’t going to get
you where you really need to be. You need to look at it from a cloud-native-application
perspective, where you are using micro services, containers, and cloud-enabled
programming languages -- your Javas and .NETs and all the other stateless types of
things – all of which give you new flexibility to flex performance-wise.
From the management side, you have to look at different ways to do your development
and different ways to do delivery. That’s where the management comes in. To do
DevOps and exploit the DevOps tools, you have to flip the way you are thinking -- to go
from the cloud down.
Cloud application development on-premises, that’s
one of the great things about containers and cloud-
native, stateless types of applications. There are
no hardware dependencies, so you can develop
the apps and services on-premises, and then run
them in the cloud, run them on-premises, and/or
use your hybrid cloud vendor’s capabilities to burst
up into a cloud if you need it. That’s the joy of having those types of applications. They
can run anywhere. They are not dependent on anything -- on any particular underlying
operating system.
But you have to shift and get into that development mode. And the automation helps you
get there, and then helps you respond quickly once you do.
Gardner: Now that hybrid deployment continuum extends to the edge. There will be
increasing data analytics, measurement, and making deployment changes dynamically
from that analysis at the edge.
It seems to me that the way you have designed and architected HPE IT management is
ready-made for such extensibility out to the edge. You could have systems run there that
can integrate as needed, when appropriate, with a core cloud. Tell me how management
as you have architected it over the years helps manage the edge, too.
de Werd: Businesses need to move their processing further out to the edge, and gain
the instant response, instant gratification. You can’t wait to have an input analyzed on
There are no hardware
dependencies, so you can
develop the apps and
services on-premises, and
then run them in the cloud.

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the edge, to have it go all the way back to a data source or all the way up to a cloud. You
want to have the processing further and further toward the edge so you can get that
instantaneous response that customers are coming to expect.
But again, being able to automate how to do that, and having the flexibility to respond to
differing workloads and moving those toward the edge, I think, is key to getting there.
Gardner: And Doug, for you, personally, do you have some takeaways from your years
of experience about innovation and how to make innovation a part of your daily routine?
How to Get Simple, Automated Management of
Your Hybrid Infrastructure
de Werd: One of the big impacts on the team that I work with is in our quality
assurance (QA) testing. It’s a very complex thing to test various configurations; that’s a
lot of work. In the old days, we had to manually reconfigure things. Now, as we use an
Agile development process, testing is a continuous part of it.
We can now respond very quickly and keep up with the Agile process. It used to be that
testing was always the tail-end and the longest thing. Development testing took forever.
Now because we can automate that, it just makes that part of the process easier, and it
has taken a lot of stress off of the teams. We are now much quicker and nimbler in
responses, and it keeps people happy, too.
Gardner: As we close out, looking to the future, where do you see management going,
particularly how to innovate using management techniques, tools, and processes?
Where is the next big green light coming from?
Set goals
de Werd: First, get your house in order in terms of taking advantage of the automation
available today. Really think about how not to just use the technology as the end-state.
It’s more of a means to get to where you want to be.
Define where your organization wants to be. Where you want to be can have a lot of
different aspects; it could be about how the culture evolves, or what you want your
customers’ experience to be. Look beyond just, “I want this or that feature.”
Then, design your full IT and development processes. Get to that goal, rather than just
saying, “Oh, I have 100 VMs running on a server,
isn’t that great?” Well, if it’s not achieving the
ultimate goal of what you want, it’s just a technology
feat. Don’t use technology just for technology’s
sake. Use it to get to the larger goals, and define
those goals, and how you are going to get there.
Don’t use technology just
for technology’s sake. Use
it to get to the larger goals.

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Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how IT
management technologies and methods have evolved, culminating in the ability to
optimize and automate workloads to exacting performance and cost requirements.
And we have learned that automation is about to get an AIOps boost from new ML and
AI capabilities just as multicloud deployments become more demanding.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Doug de Werd, Senior Product Manager for
Infrastructure Management at HPE.
And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Innovator interview. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your
host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come
back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
A discussion on how IT management technologies and methods have evolved to optimize and
automate workloads to exacting performance and cost requirements. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.
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