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Embracing the Future with Enterprise Hybrid ITExecutive Summary

IntroductionHybrid IT – sometimes described as Cloud 2.0 – is well and truly here. This approach to enterprise computing allows organisations to provide and manage part of their information technology resources in-house and use cloud-based services for others.

Some argue that it is a more mature way of looking at the concept of the cloud – when software as a service isn’t the answer to everything, businesses may well be better off exploiting their ‘legacy’ solutions, combining them with external (cloud) capability and capacity for specifi c needs.

But where does the future of this hybrid middle ground really lie? CIOs, IT Leaders and CTOs from Europe’s leading companies recently came together at an exclusive Roundtable Meeting in Belgium hosted by IBM in partnership with CorporateLeaders. The meeting was keynoted by Marnix Gillis, Distinguished Engineer, GTS Technology, Innovation and Architecture, and Stephen Moff at, Client Technical Architect, GTS Systems Services Competency both from IBM. Danny Janssens, Business Development Executive, GTS at IBM acted as moderator and Dirk De Bevere, Strategic Sales Director Benelux at IBM, was the host and part of the debate panel.

Moving Past the 80-20 Rule“Imagine if organisations could establish the right mix of cloud and traditional infrastructures to really leverage and manage innovation,” opened Marnix Gillis, IBM distinguished engineer, global technology services. This opportunity is in contrast to the traditional 80-20 rule he said, which still governs many IT departments today.

Gillis argued that 80% of IT budgets are still spent “keeping the lights on” (i.e. not adding value), while only 20% actually goes to paying for new solutions. “This is evolving,” he added, and the key to unlocking more value is by “combining things in a diff erent way than what you think today.” He said: “Not all workload will fi t in a cloud model. And even if it does fi t, there might not be a business fi t for it.” But, “The future of IT within the enterprise is hybrid. It’s using traditional IT, traditional data centres, dedicated on premise clouds or a private cloud, and dedicated off -premise clouds.”

Gillis presented data which showed workload deployments in businesses mean that by 2017, 51% of work will be done on private cloud environments, while 12% would be through SaaS; 6% would be on public clouds, while only 31% would be in traditional environments.

But with the mixed approach, he warned that keeping control of data now has to become a bigger priority. “You need to be sure that data is not fl owing away,” “This is especially so if you bridge across environments.”

Integrating systems will also need to become more important: “The reality of hybrids creates the challenge of integration. You have integration of a multitude of infrastructure platforms and software as a service. And to do this properly, you need to ask the right questions – like ‘Where does everything come from?’ and ‘How do I control all of my cloud providers?’ CTOs will need to have greater visibility of their end-to-end business value chain.”

“Hybrid IT drives increased business value and reduced global costs of ownership.”

According to Gillis, normal concepts, such as capacity management and asset management are not always obvious when CTOs move into the hybrid model. “It’s up to us to make sure we can automate, or not automate tasks, or when data needs to be provisioned or de-provisioned,” he added.

But to those who think this sounds like IT is becoming more, not less complicated, he had this to say: “We’re talking about converged infrastructure - infrastructure that can be either in a traditional data centre or in a cloud data centre, or with IBM’s or somebody else’s infrastructure. The fact is, this is where we are moving to. Business is not there yet, but what I’m convinced of is the fact that hybrid IT drives increased business value and reduced global costs of ownership.” He added: “In the past, outsourcing was all about off shoring and standardisation. While this is still the case, I would say it’s now more and more about automation and using analytics, and putting workload where it fi ts best.”

“In addition,” he said: “the expectation of employees, customers and suppliers is that the services IT provides to them improve daily. Constantly delivering the new or improved services for employees and clients is very demanding and quite a challenge for CIOs.”

According to Moff at, better decision making about the cloud will enable CIOs to concentrate on the 20% of their job that is about innovation, rather than the 80% that is merely about delivering sound IT services, and he pointed to a European energy provider which was enabled with the cloud to better predict when there would be enough wind to turn on its generators. “We did the calculations they needed three-four times faster than their existing power-on-premise environment because in no-time we were able to scale vertically using our cloud.”

He added: “Brokerage is what this is all about. Brokerage allows IT to quickly respond to the appetite of the business by getting new stuff out fast using new technologies. It’s also about making sure that data is secure enough, and available enough, and conformant enough to meet your requirements.”

He added: “cloudMatrix is a software as a service platform which provides tools to assess workloads or applications in terms of their readiness for cloud computing. It sounds relatively straight forward but a second thing it does is do what is notoriously diffi cult – actually compare providers – thanks to an algorithm called The Gravitant Capacity Unit. Simplistically, it normalises service providers’ descriptions of their services, allowing us to compare them for specifi c workloads in terms of their coverage and the extent to which that cloud provider meets any non-functional requirements.”

“In addition,” he said: “the expectation of “In addition,” he said: “the expectation of employees, customers and suppliers is that employees, customers and suppliers is that

“If you have insight and visibility of facts, you’re in a better position to take control of how the cloud is used and maybe you can be a little bit braver.”

New Brokerage Service LaunchedIn a world that will increasingly demand hybrid enterprise IT, the new task CIOs face is being able to discriminate between lots of diff erent vendors, and knowing which suppliers’ solutions best suit their and their customers’ particular needs.

Stephen Moff at, IBM’s Client Technical Architect (GTS Systems Services Competency), was there to introduce a new service by IBM that aims to take the time intensity of this away – it’s called Enterprise IT Brokerage Services.

“This new service is specifi cally designed to help clients make better, more consistent and faster decisions about what kind of cloud to use (public, private, hybrid) and which providers to chose,” he explained.

“The delivery of IT services end-to-end is complex,” he added: “So, we’ve bought a technology platform called cloudMatrix which gives CTOs visibility and insight into what cloud you’re using, who is using them, and which of your cloud service providers – whether it’s IBM, Azure or Amazon, is delivering true value for money. Most critically, it will also gauge which is performing best and which is meeting service level commitments.”

Moff at argued that the need for a good brokerage solution will massively increase. Indeed, more and more organisations are focusing on “narrower and narrower” ranges of core services they provide themselves because they add value. And this implicitly means that they will be procuring and managing an increasing number of ‘commodity’ services, mainly in the cloud.

Information is What CIOs WantOf the many benefi ts provided by cloudMatrix, a key one is being able to give users the ability to plan their cloud infrastructure, and add managed services. It will even estimate the likely IT bill of any provider chosen, and what the expenditure will be over time. And these were just some of the solutions that delegates expressed as being of benefi t to them in a panel discussion that followed, moderated by Danny Janssens, Business Development Executive, GTS, IBM.

Internationalisation was one specifi c driver that delegates identifi ed as causing a requirement to move more and more to cloud-based global applications – and with this the issue of security was also raised. For others, transition to the cloud was to improve recruitment, dealing with people leaving the business, and to enable fewer people to do the same amount of work. But there was also a strong indication that delegates were worried about how best to get ‘onto’ the cloud.

“There are indeed some very natural candidates for cloud and there are some less natural candidates for the cloud too,” said Janssens. “Understanding which is which is not always easy, and we are in a very versatile, ever changing environment.”

Interestingly, another point raised was the potential de-skilling impact that organisations might suff er from relying more heavily on the cloud. Said one delegate: “My concern is less about whether to have the cloud or not to have the cloud. My concern is knowledge – that tomorrow for doing core activity, we might no longer have the knowledge internally anymore in our IT department. Currently, if we have a problem, we are able to solve it; the future challenge will be more about how we work with partners, working together with external teams.”

ConclusionTransferring to a hybrid IT-based way of working inevitably involves signifi cant planning, signifi cant investment, and signifi cant understanding of diff erent providers about how solutions integrate with organisations’ unique ways of working.

This event revealed that the key questions IT leaders are starting to ask include conceptualising what technology controls they need to keep for themselves and what they want to outsource to the wider market.

But it also revealed that the appetite for a more hybrid way of working is genuinely there. “People are talking about agility and innovation – which I know are highly loaded words,” said Gillis. “But it’s exactly these types of discussions that I would say make things challenging and interesting. We just need to remember this: Integration of application data and services, and composition of workloads and portability of data and applications will also rise in importance. Maybe companies need a little bit control. Maybe they need a little bit more automation. This is the reality of hybrids – but it is an exciting time ahead.”

What IT leaders defi nitely showcased is that they are up for the challenge, and with the right advice and support, hybrid IT is very much within their grasp.

Dirk de Bevere Integrated Technology Services Leader Benelux, IBM Belgium

Dirk is the Sales Director for Strategic Global Technology Services in Benelux.

GTS serves customers in various industries and provides solutions ranging from smaller, short-term consultancy assignments to large, long-term managed services and outsourcing engagements. GTS specializes in the domains of Systems and Infrastructure Services, Networking, Business Continuity & Resiliency, Security, IT Services Optimization and Cloud Computing and Brokerage. As Director for Strategic Sales, Dirk is responsible for a variety of larger and more complex deals involving mostly Enterprise clients.

Dirk has 24 years of experience in the IT industry, and is now with IBM since 14 years. Today, he leads a team spanning business development, sales and solutioning. He is member of the IBM Benelux Senior Leadership Team and the IBM Belgium Executive Committee.

Before taking up his current role Dirk held several management roles in IBM’s Global Technology Services Department and prior to that in Software Group. Previously he has been Integrated Technology Services Leader in Benelux. Dirk holds a University Degree at Antwerp University and an MBA at Henley Management College.

Marnix Gillis IBM Distinguished Engineer, GTS Technology, Innovation and Architecture, IBM

Marnix Gillis is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, an executive technical advisor, leading and shaping the technical strategy and direction for IBM’s most complex accounts. He has a reputation for strong technical leadership, demonstrated by his success in leading large and complex infrastructure projects. He has gained the depth and breadth of these technical skills through more than 30 years of experience from a varied range of challenging services projects and from working with advanced technologies inside and outside IBM.

Over the last 10 years, Marnix has built broad experience in the area of strategic outsourcing. He currently is the CTO for a very large outsourcing contract in the Nordics. He is a renowned speaker at customer conferences, industry events and universities. He holds a degree of civil engineer (Master of Science in Electrical Engineering) from the University of Gent, Belgium, 1983.

Dirk de Bevere

Speakers

Stephen Moff atClient Technical Architect, GTS Systems Services Competency, IBM

Stephen Moff att is an IT architect in IBM Global Technology Services cloud

Centre of Competence, specialising recently in the emerging cloud brokerage business models. He’s had the privilege of working with IBM clients on all scales in public sector and education, fi nancial services and utilities for nearly 25 years. A Fellow and Chartered Professional of the ICS, Stephen lectures business strategy in his spare time on MSc Programmes in cloud and analytics at the National College of Ireland.School, UK. She also has a post-graduate certifi cate from Aston for teaching and learning in Higher Education, approved by the Higher Education Academy, UK.

Danny JanssensBusiness Development Executive, IBM

Danny Janssens joined IBM as recently as July 2014 after having been on the

customer side of the table for 33 years. He started out as a developer working on operating system and robotics interfaces in the automotive industry and later moved into batch application development in the fi nance sector. As the regional CIO and VP for FedEx Europe, Middle-East & Africa he covered the full IT spectrum from Helpdesk over applications to infrastructure for the 127 countries in the region.

He worked in the UK for 5 years, where he was the IT Director for Norwich Union Central Services managing the IT infrastructure and datacenters with a team of 1200 staff for all entities of the Aviva group in England, Scotland and Ireland. Of a similar scale was his next role as General Manager for IT Infrastructure and datacenters of ING in the Netherlands, where he lived for neigh on 3 years.

His last assignment prior to joining IBM was as CEO of Dexia Technology Services, running the IT infrastructure and datacenters for all members of the Dexia Group in Belgium, France and Luxemburg.

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