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Cloud technology is a springboard for digital transformation, delivering the business agility and simplicity that are so important to today’s business. Cloud is also a powerful catalyst for improving IT and user experiences, with operating principles such as anywhere access, policy automation, and visibility.

The benefits of cloud for the business, for IT operations, and for employee experiences are clear. But what if you could take the best principles of cloud and apply them across your entire IT infrastructure?

Simpler operations belong everywhere—not just the cloud

There’s no reason that the benefits of cloud need to be limited to the cloud. With the right strategy, platforms, and solutions, organizations can bring the cloud operating model to the network and across the entire cloud and network IT stack. In fact, in a recent IDC study, 60% of CIOs stated they are already planning to modify their operating model to manage value, agility, and risk by 2026.

Transitioning to this new operating model unlocks more benefits for IT leaders, in more environments and use cases. It simplifies operations for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, cutting down the complexity and fragmentation created by disconnected tools and consoles—and the different skill sets needed to work with them.

Expanding the cloud operating model also sets the stage for better collaboration between network, development, and cloud operations. By introducing a common model and language that transcends operational silos, this approach helps reduce points of friction between organizational handoffs.  The result: teams can collaborate and work together to solve problems more smoothly. Processes become more consistent, predictable, and less prone to manual errors.

Bringing the cloud operating model to the network helps your teams execute faster and be more agile. It can automate tasks such as deploying a new distributed application for users in the home and office. For example, with a cloud-managed SD-WAN, a company can establish connectivity and security in about an hour. With a traditional siloed approach, those same steps could take NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps teams days.

Once an application is up and running, the cloud operating model can support greater visibility into cloud and data center operations, application deployment, and performance. When you have improved end-to-end visibility, you can react more quickly. Your teams can troubleshoot faster, tune performance more easily, and enjoy a more intuitive experience as they do it.

When you simplify IT, better experiences and outcomes follow

What happens when the cloud operating model is brought to the network? Organizations gain the benefits of a simplified IT approach and better user experiences. But that’s not all. It also frees IT leaders to focus, innovate, and deliver better business outcomes.

Improving the application experience

Applying the cloud operating model expands visibility, creating an end-to-end view that enables more consistent governance across the infrastructure, from the network to the internet to the cloud, to help ensure a better application experience for every user.

Powering a more agile, proactive business

Making IT more agile ripples across the whole organization. By automating manual processes, you can get out in front of business changes, deploying resources to support new applications, so you can meet changing needs for business stakeholders, faster.

Controlling costs

Expanding a common operating model helps your teams work smarter with consistent management of the deployment, optimization, and troubleshooting lifecycles, both in the cloud and on-premises.

Breaking down silos for productivity

Cloud operating principles can enable consistent governance that helps bring down the barriers between siloed cloud and network teams—and help IT move beyond fragmented operations with different policies and processes.

Applying stronger security everywhere

Cloud consistency can also enhance security. With automation and improved end-to-end visibility, you can build security into every environment and make automated security updates an integral part of all lifecycle management.

Bring the best of the cloud across your infrastructure

There’s no “one size fits all” approach to a cloud operating model. It needs to be designed and tailored to align with each organization. With the right strategy, platforms, and services, you can take a big step toward simplifying IT to deliver unified experiences and improved business agility.

Discover how.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

ERP software provider SAP on Tuesday said it is partnering with IBM to infuse the latter’s Watson artificial intelligence (AI) engine across its entire solutions portfolio, including SAP S/4 HANA, S/4 HANA Cloud, SAP Business One, and SAP Business ByDesign.

The move, which is expected to help SAP exploit the natural language processing (NLP) abilities of Watson AI along with predictive insights, is aimed at boosting the productivity of companies and accelerating innovation, especially across the retail, manufacturing, and utilities sectors, the companies said in a joint statement.

IBM Watson’s capabilities, according to the companies, will be integrated into the digital assistant inside SAP Start, which is a service that runs on every computer where an instance of an SAP system is started.

SAP Start monitors the runtime state of all SAP systems, processes, and instances along with reading logs, traces, and configuration files among other threads.

“With SAP Start, users can search for, launch and interactively engage with apps provided in cloud solutions from SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud,” the companies said.

The assistant inside SAP Start can also be used to run machine learning and AI to extract information from a variety of data sources and answer business queries, the companies added.

Typically, SAP uses the term digital assistant to collectively address or define all the digital assistants and chatbots in its portfolio, according to Juergen Butsmann, head of intelligent technologies in solution management for S/4 HANA.

“The Digital Assistant is the end-users ‘support center’ for ad hoc tasks, help, FAQ, or any other off-context inquiry. Whenever a user requests tasks or services (whether that be via commands, chat questions, or, in some cases, voice commands) digital assistants/chatbots can convey and interpret the user’s request, execute it efficiently in the system, and promptly provide a response,” Butsmann wrote in a blog post.

IBM Watson integration to aid back end automation

The integration of IBM’s Watson AI into SAP’s portfolio will not only help automate back end tasks but also aid in generating business insights, said Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst of AI platforms at Omdia Research.

“I think the integration will help SAP customers in creating a natural language assistant that is capable of taking programmatic action on backend services. This can help SAP customers maximize the value that SAP offers as part of its rich yet diverse product portfolio,” Shimmin said.

The other value proposition of the Watson integration, according to Shimmin, is the ability to surface enterprise knowledge from across large and disparate datasets.

“Experientially, these two capabilities when intertwined will allow SAP users to surface and take action on valuable business insights,” Shimmin said.  

Is SAP’s digital assistant mature enough in NLP?

Although SAP invests in its own research on AI, the reason to use IBM’s Watson to power its services is SAP’s lack of maturity in natural language understanding capabilities, according to Shimmin.

“Like IBM, SAP certainly has invested heavily in its own AI research. However, that research hasn’t focused on NLP and even natural language understanding,” the analyst said. “It is within these areas that IBM has created value, a value which SAP obviously feels will help them reach their goals with SAP Start more rapidly than if they were to develop this self-same technology in-house.”

SAP’s approach was an effective strategy given the demand for AI features in the market and the rapid evolution of the technology, Shimmin said. “Not every big software player needs to build its own ChatGPT or Bard in order to succeed in the technology market. Rather, I think companies that try to chase this emerging market at the expense of their own, established capabilities, will certainly fall behind rivals that have the good sense to work cooperatively where it makes the most sense to do so.”

IBM, SAP collaborating on large language models and generative AI

The Watson partnership with SAP is the result of a longstanding collaboration between the two companies.

Currently, SAP and IBM Consulting support customers with 25 joint intelligent industry solutions that use IBM Watson capabilities underpinned by the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the companies said.

“Over the past 10 or so years, the two companies have grown in such a way that they are much more complementary. But the two have been working together a lot longer than that,” Shimmin said, adding that IBM also delivers SAP BTP on top of its own cloud platform, which ties nicely into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In addition to embedding Watson into SAP, the companies said they are working jointly on developing large language models and generative AI capabilities targeted at delivering “consistent continuous learning and automation based on SAP’s mission-critical application suite.”

Artificial Intelligence, IBM, SAP