With so much change taking place in IT today, it can be hard to keep track of what is taking place within your own IT systems. Bruno Kurtic, co-founder at Sumo Logic, argues that it is time to look at machine data analytics to help keep up with these changes
Digital transformation has gone from new approach to IT to cliché over the past six months. However, more companies are moving to this approach. What do you think the consequence of this will be?
Whatever the phrase may mean within the word soup that we like to play with, it does not change the fact that digital transformation actually began in the early 90s when banks disrupted their own local branch business models with online banking. It is continuing today. Every week, I meet executives across industries like manufacturing, government, retail and others where their strategies revolve around writing better software to deliver better coupling of often traditional products with new digital services around those products.
In fact, I see digital transformation as orthogonal to the new approach to IT. IT is evolving to facilitate all these changing requirements brought on by digital transformation but digital transformation still occurs within the old context of IT. The best in digital transformation are both the ones pushing IT to adapt and are the ones adopting new IT services and models such as IaaS/PaaS, CI/CD, agile, DevOps, big data, SaaS, etc. in order to outmanoeuvre the competition.
What does this mean in practice? Companies that do this better will win, because they will be able to focus on their core business, innovate faster, and reduce cost. That ability to innovate and improve continuously will depend on their ability to capture data generated by their digital properties, understand what that data is telling them about their customers, products and services, and use those insights to quickly improve how their products and services serve their customers.
You mention new technology adoption, and that you are seeing more of your customers adopting containers and serverless – what is driving this?
What’s driving this change is the adaptation of IT strategy to fit their new digital business model strategies and it is just a continuation of digital companies adopting modern IT to innovate faster. Containers, orchestration, serverless and other technologies like that further facilitate agility and flexibility, and they can be used to meet specific goals.
Containers and orchestration technologies enable enterprises to more efficiently build applications based on microservices architecture. These technologies and architecture enable them to create more efficient applications that enable autoscaling, fault isolation, easier maintenance, and portability.