I could spend all of my allocated ‘suggested word count for a blog’ waxing lyrical about the amazing food and sights we saw whilst in Paris but let’s focus on three things that I heard from PureApplication customers whilst there.
Before I do that here is a little context; the technology discussed at the event was IBM’s PureApplication System, a converged hardware/software platform that accelerates deployments and saves costs for IT Operations and Development budgets.
So, much is promised at these events in terms of what the technology will deliver, but as I say three things really captivated me:
1. ‘We have cut our deployment time from 6 weeks to less than a day’.
I can’t name names, the IT Manager I had breakfast with on day two would not thank me, but here was a real user of PureApplication who was seeing the marketer’s promise of the value within PureApplication being delivered at his organisation. He currently uses it to speed through releases of IBM’s Lotus Connections, which by all accounts has a complex install and configuration for each environment. In fact they make between 200 and 300 ‘tweaks’ during the install process. The overall result of using PureApplication….. a very happy customer who can now serve their end user much faster and is looking to extend its use to other development environments in 2015.
2. ‘I have a small IT department, I cannot afford to burden them with familiarising themselves with best practices and complex install routines for new software products’.
Again they shall remain anonymous, but their story is worth telling. This Insurance company wanted to utilise IBM’s BPM (Business Process Manager) tool and potentially the IBM Worklight product for creating mobile applications in 2015. His small IT Operations team however, do not have the time to acquire the best practice needed to install these tools. So they made the decision to invest in PureApplication and therefore access the PureApplication Patterns offered with the platform. The net result – they are now able to take on new technology simply and quickly to realise the gain intended from their investment.
3. ‘We have shrunk our IT Operations teams and have focused them on higher value tasks’.
Another user was more than happy to inform the audience that by using PureApplication they had taken significant cost out of their IT Operations function. The manual task of tweaking and installing software and configuring the hardware on multiple installs had been removed. Instead those staff had been directed towards ‘higher value’ tasks such as ensuring the website was performing optimally or that business users were being better served in terms of new functions in applications. It really was a positive story about how PureApplication can benefit the business as well as IT.
I left Paris with a new found belief in this technology offering. With the new cloud variant to complement the on-premise hardware version of PureApplication, the entry point has come down and now any company (small or large) can use this technology. The next 12 months will be very exciting – I know which runner Icon will continue to back.