Phil Andrews | Vice President | General Manager | CEMEA Region | Red Hat | mail me |
I feel so grateful to have a career in technology: a career in which change has been the only constant, keeping every day exciting and relevant. Arguably, the biggest change I am seeing right now has less to do with actual technology, and more to do with culture.
In all the conversations I’m having with businesses across Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), I’ve noticed that the C-Suite is more engaged than ever. Technology is no longer an IT conversation, because the implications of digitisation – of getting it right, and getting it wrong – have become too profound for others in the leadership team to ignore.
No longer a catch-all term
Suddenly, ‘technology’ is no longer a catch-all term, where having some sort of ‘IT’ should be good enough.
What chief officers of all functions now understand is that the type of technology (and the vendor) makes a huge difference to how fast you can take your business online, develop new revenue streams, mobilise an entire workforce, and come out of a global crisis in better shape than you went in.
The evidence was already there before COVID-19 struck. Over the last decade, whole sectors have been utterly transformed by innovative start-ups wielding superior technology and a unique and innovative approach to the way business is done in that sector.
Unfortunately, many businesses were still too pedestrian going into the pandemic, with outdated legacy hardware and top-down chains of command suffocating the pace of change. But this has had to change as the last 18 months have turbocharged digitisation programmes, perhaps forever.
Now, the CEOs I speak with are as comfortable talking about agile working concepts and digital engagement as a DevOps professional; CFOs regularly refer to the interoperability of their tech stack; and CMOs quiz me about the how impact of containerisation could help in getting new products or service evolutions to market more quickly.
Technology is no longer a bolt-on for a business. It is now part of the core to the central strategy, which all other things must be shaped around.
Open source technology as a means of innovating
Inevitably then, technology conversations are no longer the stuff of system architecture and technical configurations. They have become much more holistic, with people, processes, and culture taking equal billing.
In this new paradigm, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the C-Suite is being drawn to open source technology as a means of innovating. Open source means your business is less beholden to any single vendor, making it easier to adopt potentially game changing solutions from anywhere, at any time, and knowing there are people driving the kind of technological innovation needed to stay ahead.
These benefits will become more important to businesses. We are already seeing bespoke software being created at a hyper-sector level that eclipses more generic offerings, and businesses are increasingly investing in their own DevOps capabilities so that they can create applications or extensions to existing systems in-house. They’re taking these actions to support changes in their business models and stay competitive.
The concept of ‘containerisation’
One of the key changes that enables new applications to support business development ‘at the speed of change’ is the concept of ‘containerisation’. This refers to developing self-contained applications or units of functionality that can be deployed into an IT solution, like lifting containers onto a ship.
The application containers have what they need to operate, and they connect to other applications loaded onto the same IT container platform, either on premise or in the cloud, creating a complete solution. Combine this with the freedom and encouragement to develop and deploy at speed to support changed processes, and you start to see massive acceleration of digital services innovation.
Against this backdrop, the timing of OpenShift 4 – the leading open source containerisation platform – is one of the most exciting events of my 12 and half years at the organisation. Containerisation is the competitive enabler.
The OpenShift platform takes containerisation and hardens it, making it deployable on any public or private cloud environment, and with the ability to plug in third-party tools.
Automation, repeatable tasks, and a single console make once onerous day-to-day development tasks easier. With the platform, application and feature development are more cost efficient; new products can be brought to market faster and more regularly; experienced IT staff can spend more time on more valuable work; and businesses can solve problems they couldn’t before.
Every C-Suite function wins, and the bolstered bottom line benefits everyone. OpenShift has been developed and enhanced by us to allow customers to develop and deliver their new digital assets to support business changes at unprecedented speed, and deploy them in any cloud or on-premise environment.
Despite these benefits, I’ve been working with technology for long enough to know that even the best solutions need selling. Again, this is where I think the open source approach increasingly chimes with how businesses are thinking right now. When a technology investment is more of a joint C-Suite decision, outcomes and business impacts come into sharper focus.
In other words, non-technical people are less likely to care about how ‘it’ works, and are more likely to ask, ‘What can it achieve for my department or my business?’ This can be at odds with how vendors of proprietary technology work; they sometimes need to shoehorn their solution into a business case. But with a true open source approach, the conversation always begins by defining the business opportunity or problem, and only then choosing from a much broader set of solutions to address it.
In conclusion
Customers also adopt the open approach to sharing aspects of their journey, thus helping others avoid pitfalls and capturing more successful routes.
I recently had the privilege of being appointed to lead the CEMEA region, having spent five and half years supporting the innovation journeys of our enterprise customers in Asia Pacific, and nearly seven years before that running a region in Northern Europe.
I imagine I’ll have to learn about different ways of conducting business in this new region, but I’m confident that, when it comes to the core mission of helping businesses use technology to succeed, there are far fewer geographical nuances. For one thing, businesses compete in a global market, and so what is working well in one place is likely to be adopted elsewhere.
As businesses around the world converge on an outcome-led approach to technological investments, where decisions are more cross functional than ever before, leaders are looking for collaborative and agile internal frameworks that will continue to accelerate their digital journeys.
Open source provide an approach that can help our customers develop these capabilities, and I hope we can be a partner that drives change in this region.
