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By Serge Lucio, Vice President and General Manager, Agile Operations Division

This is a continuation of Broadcom’s blog series: 2023 Tech Trends That Transform IT.  Stay tuned for future blogs that dive into the technology behind these trends from more of Broadcom’s industry-leading experts.

Enterprise networks are undergoing a profound transformation. These changes are being driven by growing SaaS adoption, increasing workload migration to the cloud, and the need to support the expanding number of employees who work-from-anywhere.

Traditional enterprise wide area networks, or WANs were designed primarily to connect remote branch offices directly to the data center. They rely on centralized security performed by backhauling traffic through the corporate data center, which impairs application performance and makes them expensive and inefficient. More importantly, WANs lack the flexibility and scalability that digital business requires.

Unlike traditional enterprise WANs, Software-Defined Wide Area Network, or SD-WAN technology meets the complex requirements for fast, reliable access to cloud-based resources. For example, SD-WAN technology makes it possible for an enterprise employee to successfully connect to Microsoft 365 from home. Policy-based routing dynamically determines the best path for optimal performance as it traverses multiple internet service providers and systems for network access, SASE secured connectivity, and cloud network access, before reaching the data center server where Microsoft 365 is running.

But SD-WAN’s reliance on the Internet can introduce new challenges, and new requirements for network observability and monitoring. Every ISP and system in the complex network path between users and cloud-based resources is a potential point of failure, most of which enterprise network operations teams do not own, manage, or even have visibility into.

On January 25, a minor error in a routine configuration change to a router at Microsoft caused a global network outage. This one minor error resulted in widespread connectivity issues for 90 minutes, leaving customers unable to reach Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and other applications. Situations like this can present a troubleshooting nightmare for enterprise network operations teams who need to address complaints from users, but don’t have complete end-to-end visibility of the entire network path from the user to the data center.

Looking Ahead: How I See Network Operations Evolving

I believe that in 2023, SaaS adoption, workload migrations to cloud, and work-from-home initiatives will continue to drive enterprise network transformation. The internet will become an even more integral component of the enterprise networks as organizations continue to augment or replace their legacy WANs by using SD-WAN technology to build high-performance chains of connectivity from lower-cost and commercially available Internet access.

As enterprises continue to transform and modernize their networks to better meet the needs of digital business, they will need a new approach to network observability, and requirements for  in-depth analysis and actionable insights will become increasingly critical.

In 2023 and beyond, effective network operations (NetOps) will demand more extensive coverage of user experience metrics than ever before. Network monitoring needs will expand beyond traditional managed networks to encompass unmanaged third-party networks. Experience-driven NetOps approaches will proliferate and become more tightly aligned with the network. Here’s more on how this transformation will progress.

User Experience Monitoring Will Become Imperative

In response to the increasingly complex connectivity demands of digital business, network architectures continue to evolve, and user experience monitoring has become an essential data source for NetOps. This is not surprising, since customer satisfaction and employee productivity remain in the top three business priorities for many organizations. For the network team, it’s no longer just about the traditional approach to monitoring network health. Teams need real-time insight into the state of the network and how changing network conditions are affecting  user experience so they can react quickly and ensure the delivery of consistent and high-quality network services to support that digital business success.

Monitoring Will Expand to the Edge and Beyond

As digital transformation goes to full throttle, network operations must align with the business more quickly and closely. With nearly half of enterprise workloads projected to be deployed in cloud infrastructure this year, NetOps team responsibilities will extend to both the networks they own and the ones they don’t – including third-party networks like home networks, ISP networks, and cloud environments. This extension will address the visibility and control blind spots that teams confront with cloud and multi-cloud networking.

Experience-Driven Approaches Will Advance

Teams’ increasing need for better visibility and control of both managed and unmanaged networks will drive adoption of Experience-Driven Network Observability and Management solutions and approaches. With this approach, the network team can understand, manage, and optimize the performance of digital services, regardless of the network they may be running on and gain visibility into every communication path and degradation point for the entire user experience delivery chain.

The adoption of experience-driven approaches will increase as organizations seek to improve their ability to monitor and measure the user experience. Gartner expects that by 2026 at least 60% of I&O leaders will use Digital Experience Monitoring to measure application, services and endpoint performance from the user’s viewpoint, up from less than 20% in 2021.

Applying active and continuous measurements can help network teams dramatically improve the network operations workflow. With these capabilities, they can effectively reduce false alarms, validate change and compliance, establish reliable visibility, and boost automation.

Monitoring Will Fuse Better With the Network

Experience-driven network monitoring tools and practices will become a seamless part of the network, translating volumes of disparate data (across network device performance, network and internet paths, alarms/faults/logs/configs, Cloud and SaaS application performance, network traffic flows and user experience metrics) into actionable insights about the current and future state of a network.

Outcomes That Matter

Moving forward, NetOps teams will be expected to deliver more value for the business, so they need to actively monitor and manage the network. By doing so, they’ll gain the detailed intelligence and actionable insights they need to assure network service delivery, and help the business reduce risks, optimize cost and resource efficiency, and boost revenue opportunities.

By delivering the right insights to the right team, they can quickly find and fix issues to improve mean time to resolution (MTTR) of network issues or prove the innocence (MTTI) of the network, while enabling the right team to address the issue. NetOps teams will then be able to proactively prevent network problems before they degrade user experience and derail the business.

Your Next Steps

This year, your organization’s success will be increasingly reliant upon the success of transformation initiatives in such areas as cloud, SaaS, and digitization. The question then becomes “How do you know if your network is ready for the emerging demands of the digital business?” NetOps teams play a critical role in helping these initiatives – and the business – succeed in 2023. Having unified insights to relevant network and digital experience metrics allows these teams to ensure that modern networks deliver optimized user experiences.

Broadcom can help boost your organization’s ability to manage evolving requirements for modern network technologies and support your current and future transformation initiatives. Visit our Experience-Driven NetOps page  to learn more about how we are helping enterprise NetOps teams around the world to break down monitoring data silos, expedite issue remediation, and reduce operational complexities.

To learn more about how Broadcom predicts that in 2023, effective network operations (NetOps) will demand better end-to-end visibility, including more extensive coverage of user experience metrics than ever before, read the report here. 

About Serge Lucio:

Broadcom Software

Serge Lucio is Vice President and General Manager of the Agile Operations Division at Broadcom. He is responsible for the company’s software solutions that help organizations to accelerate digital transformation and drive organizational agility.

IT Leadership, Networking

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Climate change is the pre-eminent issue of our present and our future. And figures suggest that our attempts at staving it off so far are falling well short. If we are to achieve a cleaner, greener future, one of the most significant overhauls will be a shift to electric vehicles (EVs). Unsurprisingly, lining our roads with gas-guzzling, fossil-fuel-burning vehicles for the past century has had a less than ideal environmental impact.

In point of fact, transportation accounts for 20-25% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide, with road transport accounting for three-quarters of that total. Clearly, EVs need to move from being the exception to the norm – and soon.

EVs and the automotive industry

Fortunately for the possibility of a liveable human future, the automotive sector has begun taking steps to counter and ultimately eliminate its contributions to GHG emissions. Tesla sales have gone a long way to normalising electric vehicle ownership, despite the high price tag. Maybe you don’t own a Tesla, but you probably know someone who does. Tesla has granted EVs a certain degree of cultural currency, thanks in no small part to the company’s controversial CEO, Elon Musk, and the cult of personality that has developed around him. A broad segment of the public has accepted that EVs are the future.

Other automobile manufacturers have, too. Most leading automotive companies have set dates for when they will transition entirely to “electrified” cars (batteries and hybrids) and/or pure EVs. The list includes Bentley by 2030 and Ford, BMW, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and others by 2050.

Some legislatures are also fuelling the transition. Starting in 2035, the EU is banning the sale of petrol- and diesel-fuelled cars in order to meet its promise of carbon neutrality by 2050. In the US, California is following suit. 

If everyone agrees, what’s the holdup?

The automotive industry is only moving in one direction, but from afar it can seem as if it’s doing so at an unhurried pace.

The primary issue, as ever, is cost. Electric vehicles cost more to make and so cost more to buy. Currently that pricing makes EVs prohibitively expensive for most of the car-buying public. That will change with time, as EV technology develops, demand spikes, and production scales.

Then there are politics and preferences. Some people simply don’t like driving electric cars. Others don’t want to be told that they have todrive one. Mandates will help fix this, but it won’t be pretty so long as people insist on fiddling with the radio while the planet burns.

Another issue is charging stations, or the lack thereof. If the US is to properly match its forecasted sales demand, the number of EV chargers will need to quadruple between 2022 and 2025, and grow by more than eight-fold by 2030. The UK’s Climate Change Committee posits that every 100 kilometres of road will need up to 1,170 charging stations by 2030. At the current growth rate, only a quarter of that number will be in place by 2032.

All of this seems to indicate that the EV revolution’s reach threatens to exceed its grasp. Except there already exists a quick, convenient, durable, and cost-effective solution that promises to help the “auto EVolution” achieve its short-term aims.

Enter connected lighting

Connected public lighting can help bring about the EV overhaul the planet badly needs. Better still, it can do so in a sustainable, speedy, and efficient way, with minimal disruption to public spaces. The solution exists and is available for implementation today, but so far it has been underutilised.

There are two key areas in which connected lighting can prove pivotal. First, by freeing up capacity in the electrical grid to meet the growing need for EV charging. Second, by offering the opportunity to deploy charging points in existing street lighting architecture. Smart poles in a city or municipality lighting network serve as public digital assets, adding to basic illumination a broad range of potentialities, including environmental sensing, public broadband access, and — vitally — EV charging.

Freeing up the grid

When connected and properly managed, monitored, and controlled, LED lighting systems can produce energy savings of as much as 80% over conventional alternatives. Given that two-thirds of professional light points around the world are still non-LED and non-connected, the potential savings of transitioning to a connected lighting system are enormous.

In the EU’s residential sector alone, upgrading the 1.7 billion conventional light points to ultra-efficient LEDs could effectively generate electricity savings of 34.1 TWh annually—enough to charge a whopping 10 million EVs. Consider those numbers on a global scale and connected lighting’s potential to make a positive impact on EV implementation becomes obvious.

Using the existing infrastructure

As noted, one of the EV industry’s worst pain points is how to deploy the necessary number of charging points, both in terms of choosing where to place them and how to do so in a way that doesn’t drastically disrupt public life — which constructing the required numbers of new charging points from scratch almost certainly would.

Connected LED lighting addresses each of these problems. First, and most obviously, there’s no need to run additional underground wiring as light points are already electrified. There’s also no need to construct additional fixtures, as streetlights are already widely distributed across urban areas. This lets cities avoid the cost and inconvenience of greenlighting a slate of new citywide construction projects. It’s also aesthetically beneficial, avoiding additional street furniture in already cluttered areas.

In these ways, connected LED street lighting can help solve the EV infrastructure problem—while at the same making the energy available to power millions of EVs without overwhelming the power grid.

No time to waste

While solutions to the climate emergency are caught up in seemingly intractable policy discussions, its effects are already being felt worldwide, and will only worsen. The number of floods worldwide has increased by a factor of fifteen since 1950, and the number of wildfires by a factor of eight. This is not a problem reserved for future generations: it is here now. All of us, and especially those with the power to enact change, must face this reality head on.

EVs are the obvious next step when it comes to transport, with clear and significant benefits. By freeing up electricity through energy savings and making use of existing city infrastructure, connected lighting can help knock down some of the obstacles slowing adoption and speed up the movement toward the sustainable state the planet so badly needs to attain.

To find out how to start taking action now click here.

Car Tech, Cars, Electric Cars, Technology Industry

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Under new iterations of remote and hybrid work, the solution for some companies may involve monitoring employees electronically. For CIOs asked to implement such tools, it’s critical to understand the legal and ethical aspects of new technologies.

“No one’s saying you can’t do it. You need to have a really good justification for doing it,” says Jennifer Abruzzo, General Counsel of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board.

Abruzzo will dissect those contours at CIO’s Future of Work Summit, a virtual event taking place February 15. The interactive conference will tackle themes of understanding generational differences, creating a vibrant workplace culture, and implementing innovations such as intelligent automation.

The summit kicks off with a conversation with Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, whose new initiative, Moms First, advocates for public and private sector changes to expand workplace choices for women and to remove barriers to equality.

Later, learn from DXC Technology senior vice president and CIO Kristie Grinnell about how the company implemented a “culture first” strategy to grow its 130,000-strong workforce. And join an intergenerational conversation with human resources expert Anthony Onesto about how Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials in technology leadership positions can build a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce that will attract Gen Z employees.

Innovative IT leaders should be testing new models of work such as automation. We will take a deep dive into an effort at Johnson & Johnson to apply intelligent automation across a number of areas – an effort that could deliver a billion dollars in value, according to J&J’s Ajay Anand, vice president, global services strategy and transformation; and Stephen Sorensen, senior vice president, technology services, supply chain, data and intelligent automation.

Another area worthy of exploring is implementing low- or no-code platforms. Breaking down the benefits and challenges of distributed development will be Chris Haas, director of product, app engine, at ServiceNow, InfoWorld Contributing Editor Isaac Sacolick, and Computerworld Senior Writer Lucas Mearian.

IDC’s Amy Loomis, research vice president for the Future of Work practice, will share what the latest research shows about the promise of productivity and flexible work models.

How do you put all of these learnings together, especially when so many IT leaders are dealing with burnout — their own and among their staffs? Get answers during an interactive workshop with Lisa Duerre, a Silicon Valley insider and strategist, and learn what it takes to be an effective leader. The session will leave attendees with valuable insights, leadership tools, and a personal action plan to thrive.

Continuing the professional development conversation, Tom Graham, partner and global head of technology at the executive search firm Stonehaven, shares his perspective on the talent landscape as well as tips for how tech leaders can make themselves attractive candidates for their next position.

The day wraps with an exploration of full stack leadership to build high-performing teams. Hear from Carolyn Levy, president of Randstad Technologies Group; Nick Marchand, vice president of digital and technology operations and cyber security at Cineplex Entertainment; and André Allen, vice president of information technology, chief privacy officer and CISO with the MaRS Discovery District.

Throughout the summit, sponsors including Adobe and Nexthink will offer thought leadership and solutions on subjects such as designing human-first, outcomes-driven experiences and obtaining better employee experiences with network orchestration.

Check out the full summit agenda here. The event is free to attend for qualified attendees. Don’t miss out – register today.

Photo: Speakers at CIO’s Future of Work Summit include (clockwise from left) Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Moms First and founder of Girls Who Code; Johnson & Johnson Vice President of Global Services Strategy & Transformation Ajay Anand; and Jennifer Abruzzo, General Counsel of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board.

Human Resources, IT Leadership, Remote Work, Robotic Process Automation

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By Tapan Mehta, Global Healthcare Solutions Executive at Palo Alto Networks

Over the last decade, healthcare has offered new lines of services such as telehealth and remote patient monitoring, expanded accessibility and ease for both patients and healthcare professionals, and supported innovations that measurably improve patient outcomes. It’s a profound digital transformation.

Today’s digital healthcare organizations rely on data and IT in ways they never have before. Healthcare delivery has expanded beyond the four walls of a traditional acute care setting to ambulatory to the nascent hospital-at-home settings. IT continues to play a pivotal role in this ever-expanding healthcare delivery model and is tasked to not only drive successful business outcomes but also do so in a secure manner whereby patient privacy and data security are not compromised.

The pandemic further reinforced and accelerated the digitization of healthcare services. When COVID hit, within a matter of days, healthcare organizations had to pivot and create an environment whereby not only their employees could work remotely but also find ways to still deliver healthcare services in a virtual setting. They created new environments for operation and care — but also significantly expanded the surface that needed to be secured

The top challenges of securing healthcare now

Healthcare’s digital transformation has created so many new opportunities — not only for patients and care providers but also for bad actors. Today, healthcare leaders need to think about three things:

1. Ransomware: As healthcare operations have become digitized, attackers have taken notice. The healthcare industry is now a top target for ransomware attacks. When successful, those attacks can impact operations in ways that are life-threatening, beyond simply harming the business. In 2021, hackers published extensive patient information from US hospital chains in Florida and Texas. Confidential patient data was posted to the dark web, including files with personally identifiable information as well as tens of thousands of scanned diagnostic results and letters to insurers.

2. IoT/IoMT: Another challenge the industry faces is the abundance of devices within healthcare settings that are connected to the organization’s network. The majority of these connected medical devices, such as patient monitors and infusion pumps, have been around for a long time. In fact, there can be multiple generations of devices present across healthcare environments including hospitals, acute care, and outpatient facilities.

This abundance of older devices creates visibility challenges as organizations attempt to identify all their connected devices. Security challenges are then multiplied by the need to update devices for potential security vulnerabilities, even when many devices have minimal security capabilities. These vulnerabilities make medical IoT devices perfect entry points for malware or ransomware attacks. The real risk is that when an attacker breaks into one of these devices, they can move laterally within a healthcare organization’s network, which can have catastrophic impacts. The FBI issued its own alert that unpatched medical devices were a growing target for cyberattacks, adversely impacting healthcare operational functions, patient safety, data confidentiality, and data integrity.

3. Hybrid environments: With many healthcare staff now having the ability to work both on-site as well as remotely, there are new security challenges that need to be solved. Whether working from home or anywhere else, healthcare employees need to have the same level of security as they do within the four walls of a medical facility. They also need the same level of bandwidth and low latency for accessing patient records in order to provide an appropriate level of care.

The new fundamentals for securing healthcare

With all the security challenges that healthcare organizations face, what has become abundantly clear is that they must adopt a proactive programmatic approach to delivering comprehensive security throughout the continuum of care. What that really means is making sure that organizations have the right infrastructure and that the applications that are running in healthcare environments have the necessary security capabilities. It’s also about making sure that the users who are accessing information while providing care are protected and secured.

See and secure IoMT: Healthcare organizations need to proactively manage their devices. Your biomedical and clinical engineering teams know and feel the pain of managing these devices. You want to empower them to make smarter capital planning decisions while ensuring that the operational burden of maintenance and repair is reduced.Enable secure hybrid work: Enabling healthcare professionals with connectivity to securely provide services from anywhere is a top priority.Protect your cloud environments: The use of the cloud is growing across healthcare. As organizations move to the cloud, having the right security controls and visibility in place to enable workloads is a must.Ensure compliance: Regulatory compliance will never go away. It is incumbent on healthcare organizations to have the right investments to enable ongoing compliance with regulations such as HIPAA.Leverage cyber automation: Healthcare is under tremendous staffing and resource constraints. Organizations can optimize healthcare resources by integrating automation to help secure operations, endpoint devices, cloud or hybrid workplaces, and security operations centers.

Security should never be an afterthought. As we continue to come out of the pandemic, moving toward some new norm, security should not be viewed as a cost center but more of a critical business partner within the healthcare organization.

To learn more about Palo Alto Networks healthcare solutions, please visit our site.

About the author:

Tapan Mehta is the Global Healthcare Solutions Executive at Palo Alto Networks. In his role, Tapan is accountable for the overall global strategy, solution development, thought leadership, business development efforts, and go-to-market execution. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan where he studied electrical engineering with a minor in business administration. He has spoken at several healthcare conferences and is an active member in the global healthcare community. Tapan has authored multiple articles/papers/blogs in industry-leading publications. More information can be found on LinkedIn.

Data and Information Security, IT Leadership

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

Based in Pittsburgh and privately owned, grocery chain Giant Eagle, with 34,000 employees across 570 locations, raced to deliver new digital experiences and buying capabilities for their customers during those intensely challenging early months of the pandemic. And it’s during that time when Ball joined, in June 2020.

“The pandemic certainly accelerated the growth and adoption of buying online, and that certainly caused us to accelerate the landscape and breadth of the offering we have,” he says. “We had to mature that offering very quickly to handle the scale and scope of demand, and the ability to personalize the digital interaction with households and customers.”

With annual revenues of around $11 billion, Giant Eagle also decided to disband their corporate office—not temporarily but permanently. So it’s a completely virtual enterprise, and all efforts were made to maintain the close-knit culture Giant Eagle had, as well as transform the culture to one that’s more proactive and assertively aligned with business partners.

“We worked really hard as a technology group to walk a mile in our business partners’ shoes, and understand what kind of objectives each is trying to accomplish in their particular area of responsibility,” he says. “We are here to help you be successful, and that’s gone a long way in deepening relationships where they support and help us to be successful and vice versa. They know we are there to do that with them.”

Kirk Ball, EVP and CIO at Giant Eagle

Giant Eagle

Another evolving priority is their ability to effectively manage data and create an analytics platform that provides insights into the stories the data is telling, and, in turn, reveal those stories to decision makers across different functions in the business.

“We give them more opportunity to peer around the corner as how trends evolve in their particular area so they can either do a course correction or accelerate in a particular way, whether that’s in growth of a category of sales or driving some efficiency in terms of our supply chain,” he says. “That analytics platform is consistently growing in importance.”

CIO Leadership Live host Maryfran Johnson, recently spoke with Ball about effective digital retail strategies, aligning with the CEO and optimizing the customer experience. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On the CEO as an enabler: I haven’t worked with other CEOs across the grocery retail landscape, but as the CEO, [Laura Karet] is incredibly brilliant. She is very curious and takes a genuine interest in technology. Whether it’s the ability to personalize a customer’s experience, create a very rich loyalty program to interact with customers, use technology to drive efficiency and effectiveness for our team members, or her analytic capability, she recognizes that technology is a competitive differentiator in the industry we’re in. It’s awesome to work with somebody like that. She and the whole executive leadership team have been big supporters in investing in technology so we can create competitive differentiation in the marketplace.

On IT talent: When I got here, I recognized we had a lot of very capable people. In many cases, though, they needed a bit more support, encouragement and empowerment. The pandemic, I think, helped us realize that all of our team members in North America remained very productive, or even gained a bit of productivity, as we went to a completely remote work situation. I think that helped open the mindset of the organization to say whether you’re in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or anywhere, let’s continue to try and expand the areas in which we search for talent. We then started a journey to open a global capability center in Bangalore, India because we recognized there’s a wealth of talent there. Now we have up to 125 team members over there, but we’re searching for more. We’ll still have a rich, robust presence in North America but this allows us to create a global technology team. It exposes different cultures and approaches to technology. I think that enriches the capability of the whole team.

On emerging tech trends: One thing I have a high degree of interest in, and I think we are curious about in our organization, is augmented reality; virtual reality may be a little bit further out. I think something like up to 95% of business for grocers occurs in a store setting. That implies there’s a lot of opportunity to continue enriching the experience. So how do you animate inanimate objects in a store to create a deeply immersive experience for customers as they come into that store? That ability to bring additional information about product on shelf to life is added promotional information. I can tell you where the source was from, how long an item has been on shelf, some things you can do with this product you may not know about, and so on. That ability to augment reality is quite interesting. Once we figure out ways to maybe have contact lenses or glasses that could see that virtual reality and make it a hands-free experience, I think there is something to that.

On data analytics: The first thing we’ve done is put up a master data management capability. What that’s resulted in, for example, is we no longer have people in a meeting with different reports than others on the same topic, who then spend time arguing because there isn’t a master system of record for that particular data object. We’re also giving people introspection into various sets of data, the way the business operates, so they don’t have to take one set of data. The way the business runs is you have to look at all of those sets of information together to make a collective understanding. Do you have the right product in the right location at the right price, creating the right margin? Putting data objects together the way that the business runs has been very impactful for our business partners to better understand item and product margin, how products are moving through a particular store, and if we have the right products in the right store to match the taste and preferences of that local community.

On leadership: I was always big about frequently walking around and stopping by peoples’ cubes and being informal. And I guess you take that for granted a little bit. I realized, as we got into the virtual world, just how important it is for that frequency of communication when you can’t do it in person. But it’s still important. So I meet with those that I work with directly three times a week, and the leadership team once a week. I also meet with the whole enterprise group once every three weeks. So there’s a frequency of communication because it’s important for those you work with to be noticed, recognized, and listened to. The whole experience with our global capability center has just reinforced that. It’s very important for people to have their ideas heard, and to be able to contribute to the development of the strategy so it becomes their strategy, not my strategy. There’s so much power in that. People buy in and they get energized when they have a chance to contribute like that.

Analytics, Augmented Reality, CIO, Digital Transformation, Employee Experience, IT Leadership, Retail Industry, Virtual Reality

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Cloud, sustainability, scale, and exponential data growth—these major factors that set the tone for high performance computing (HPC) in 2022 will also be key in driving innovation for 2023. As more organizations rely on HPC to speed time to results, especially for their data-intensive applications, the $40B market[1] faces challenges and opportunities. Fortunately, the HPC community is both collaborative and transparent in our work to apply and advance supercomputing technologies. 

Recently members of our community came together for a roundtable discussion, hosted by Dell Technologies, about trends, trials, and all the excitement around what’s next. 

Answers to Supercomputing Challenges

We identified the following challenges and here provide leading thoughts on each concern.

Sustainability: As the HPC market grows, so do the implications of running such energy-intensive and complex infrastructure. In an effort to achieve sustainability, industry leaders are prioritizing ways to reduce CO2 impact and even decarbonize HPC—not an easy task with total power usage increasing. What’s motivating our move to energy reduction:

A dependence on expensive fossil fuels that makes supercomputing more costly overallThe high and unfavorable environmental impact of fossil fuel-based energyPressure from governmental agencies to design more efficient solutions and data centers

Though HPC customers want to measure their own energy usage, the tools to do so may not yet offer sufficient metrics at the application scale. Alternatively, some in the European Union are shifting their priority from trying to run operations faster, to trying to run them with lower power consumption. This calls for experimenting with more efficient choices like running workloads with different chips. 

Cooling: Over the next few years, we will see an increase in the use of silicon processors and accelerators which require significantly more power—and thus generate more heat. As leaders in the HPC industry, we are worried about how to cool these data centers. 

Many are looking at innovative data center designs including modular centers and colocation. Another big focus is on liquid cooling.[2] Direct liquid cooling offers superior thermal management and five times the cooling capacity of air flow. Immersion cooling leverages oil-based engineered fluids for a high performance, complex cooling solution. Deployed successfully around the globe, liquid cooling is becoming essential to future proofing data centers.

Scaling out and developing large-scale systems: To meet demand, the HPC industry is developing and honing strategies to effectively scale and deploy large systems that are both efficient and reliable. It’s a tall order, and one that will hinge on a few factors:

Accelerator deployment and management at scaleChanges to power and cooling design decisions at very large scaleOpen-source deployment of high-performance clusters to run simulation, AI, and data analytics workloads

What’s New and Growing Among HPC Users? 

In the HPC industry, we are experiencing and driving massive shifts in terms of what we do, and how and where we do it. Here are the shifts we noted:

Delivery Models: Moving from an almost strictly on-premises systems approach (with some remote access services), HPC is embracing remote delivery models. Customer interest in HPC delivery models like colocation, managed services, and cloud computing is driven by tremendous growth in service-based models (including IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) along with on-demand and subscription payment models. Of course, data center challenges are also driving demand for these alternatives. New solutions, including Dell APEX HPC Services and HPC on Demand, address these customer requirements and wants.

Workflow Optimization from Edge to Core/Cloud and Back: Integration with edge devices as well as integration with different HPC systems is currently designed in-house or otherwise customized. Moving forward, we will see workflows that are more capable and widely adopted to facilitate edge-core-cloud needs like generating meshes, performing 3D simulations, performing post-simulation data analysis, and feeding data into machine learning models—which support, guide, and in some case replace the need for simulation.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML): AI/ML will continue growing as an important workload in HPC. Due to the rapid growth in data sizes, there’s an increased need for HPC solutions that can run large training models. At the same time, these models can complement simulation, guiding targets or reducing parameter space for some problems. In the HPC community, we recognize a need for tools to support machine learning operations and data science management; these tools must be able to scale and integrate with HPC software, compute and storage environments.

Data Processing Units: We anticipate a jump in DPU usage but must support customers in figuring out which use cases offer quantifiable advantages in price/performance and performance/watt. It’s important to note that more research and benchmark comparisons are needed to help customers make the best decisions. Some examples of when DPUs can be advantageous for HPC workloads include: 

Collective operationsBare metal provisioning for maximum HPC performance by moving the hypervisor to the DPU, freeing up CPU cyclesImproving communications by task offload; If codes are task-based, the user can potentially move tasks to less busy nodes

Composable Infrastructure: We note the benefits in resource utilization offered by composable infrastructure, but still see uncertainty about whether it’s the future or a niche. As with DPUs, more research and quantifiable comparisons are needed to support customers in determining whether composable infrastructure is right for their next system. Yes, specific AI workflows require special hardware configurations. Though composable infrastructure may remove the restrictions of traditional architectures, there’s debate[3] about whether it can scale and whether the ROI would be reached by increased flexibility and utilization.

Quantum computing: 

As an HPC community, we share a growing consensus that quantum computing systems (QC) will and must be integrated with ‘classical’ HPC systems. QC systems are superior only at certain types of calculations and thus may best serve as accelerators. At Dell Technologies we have developed a hybrid classical/quantum platform that leverages Dell PowerEdge servers with Qiskit Dell Runtime, and IonQ Aria quantum processing units. With the platform, classical and quantum simulation workloads can execute on‐premises, while quantum workloads, such as modeling larger and more complex molecules for pharmacological development, can be executed with IonQ QPUs.[4]

The HPC Outlook for 2023

The impressively large HPC market continues to grow at a healthy rate, fueled by commercial demand for data processing and AI/ML training. HPC workloads and delivery models are more diverse than ever, leading to a more diverse customer community. And in HPC, community is important. Though we face some of the greatest challenges in application, system and data center scaling, HPC technologies remain at the leading edge of computing. 

As a community, we keep sharing information and we stay on top of developments to realize the maximum benefits of HPC. A robust resource for sharing, learning and networking can be found with the Dell HPC Community, found at dellhpc.org. This global community of HPC customers, users and companies comes together for weekly online events that are open to all as well as in-person meetings scheduled three times a year. 

Engage with the Dell HPC community by visiting dellhpc.org.

[1] https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/05/30/hyperion-hpc-market-is-stabilizing-and-headed-to-50b-by-2026/

[2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/servers/power-and-cooling.htm#tab0=0

[3] https://sc22.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=pan117&sess=sess183

[4] https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/ready-solutions/briefs-summaries/hybrid-quantum-solution-brief.pdf.external

***

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IT Leadership

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Lavoro con aziende dalla tenera età di 16 anni… in questi pochi 35 anni ho visto molte cose succedere ai miei clienti: aziende apparentemente prominenti e arroganti “scomparire” come bolle di sapone, altre sopravvivere nonostante forti cambiamenti nei mercati, e altre ancora venire acquistate e cambiare completamente rotta, non necessariamente verso il successo.
Ricordo una massima di Helmut Kohl: “non si cambia direzione quando il treno è partito”. Questa massima ha un doppio taglio poiché quando il “treno è partito” si deve essere certi della destinazione, ma vi lascio immaginare le conseguenze di un’incertezza. Eppure l’incertezza è sicuramente una costante. Occorre una vera visione, non come buzz-word degli anni Novanta, dico una “visione” sul serio!


Vado al punto: perché alcune aziende si sono schiantate e altre sono invece sopravvissute? Generalmente mi hanno risposto con un “semplice, basta essere flessibili”. La flessibilità è un valore, ma bisogna vedere in che modo sia giusto applicarla. Così ho trovato aziende (molte) dove il concetto di flessibilità era indissolubilmente legato al ferreo guanto d’acciaio della gestione padronale o dei soci, con un organigramma “a stella” dove tutto ruotava intorno al “padrone”, centrale, perché l’azienda è “sua” (questo non lo si discute). Questo vizio di visione è ricorrente nel mercato italiano e porta a venir meno di tutti i benefici della condizione di “azienda” delle imprese.
L’azienda è un sistema, un organismo vivente, ricco di debolezze tipiche del genere umano, ma anche dei suoi pregi. Le debolezze sono ovviabili attraverso l’#organizzazione ed il #criterio. Non credo di essere l’unico a considerare esclusivamente questi due concetti fondamentali. Portarli avanti in modo pratico, anche se non semplice ma nemmeno impossibile, rende veramente flessibile e longeva un’azienda.


Fatevi una cortesia e chiedetevi quali siano i vostri criteri primari, ma come azienda e non come persona, quindi riduceteli all’osso e metteteli in atto attraverso un’organizzazione della vostra azienda tramite un organigramma e una revisione periodica (suggerisco trimestrale) che miri alla correzione di scostamenti dalla rotta fissata.


Fatelo e il vostro treno non lo fermerà nessuno.

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With the shift to hybrid work here to stay, CIOs are building out new strategies designed to convert employee flexibility into organisational efficiency in Singapore.

Such strategies remain anchored around overcoming key business challenges linked to modernised technology infrastructure and data security, viewed as mission-critical in creating enhanced hybrid work frameworks.

In response, CIOs are blending boardroom and employee demands to maximise the potential of hybrid work through a commitment to evolving business and technology requirements.

“We believe that hybrid work arrangements are not the future, it is now,” observed Lindsay Brown, Vice President and General Manager of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) at GoTo.

While such an approach may have been created out of necessity during the height of the pandemic, Brown said new research suggests hybrid is now the default form of work in Singapore.

“The pandemic accelerated the adoption of remote and hybrid working practices, as well as changed how IT enables and supports the workforce,” he recalled.

“Many enterprises found themselves unprepared without a solid work-from-home plan, forcing them to scramble to ‘just get it done’ and even to neglect security protocols to maintain some semblance of business continuity.”

Despite this transition triggering the use of “stop gap measures”, opportunities are now emerging for CIOs to assume a leadership role in rebuilding operations and rethinking organisational structure – one that is built on trust and flexibility.

“This will ultimately lead to more success for organisations and career fulfilment for employees,” Brown advised.

Assessing new hybrid work priorities

When the pandemic hit, businesses had to adapt to remote work seemingly overnight as a matter of survival. With no company immune to the impact of COVID-19, GoTo transitioned to a remote-centric organisation, which differs from being remote-friendly.

“We define remote-centric as remote work being part of the core ‘design’ of the company where the workforce is empowered to work remotely,” Brown said. “As a remote-centric company we were able to test and learn what works for us and listen to employee feedback.”

As part of this transition, Brown and his team cultivated a culture that “nurtured and prioritised” working outside of the traditional office environment and work hours, aligned to the priorities of teams distributed throughout different time zones and geographies.

According to Frost & Sullivan findings – research commissioned and produced in partnership with GoTo – nearly half (44%) of respondents operating on a work-from-office model reported significantly higher turnover in 2021 than in 2020, compared to 22% of hybrid work organisations who reported a higher turnover.

“Businesses that listen to and accommodate the variety of different demands from candidates, contributing to a personalised experience will have the winning element in attracting staff,” Brown added. “This becomes significantly more important when aiming to fill the role of a scarce candidate pool, such as the technology sector.”

By embracing a remote-centric approach, Brown said GoTo was able to lead from the front and take into consideration employee feedback, empowering individuals and providing a workplace that suited all different work personas in the process.

“We’ve learned a lot about the employee experience during this time, and how we can continue to engage individuals and teams, regardless of their work personas and preferences when it comes to flexible working,” he said.

“We communicated with our employees, to reaffirm their purpose and value on the team, and built trust amongst each other to establish the confidence in understanding everyone else’s roles too.”

Despite the benefits, Brown acknowledged that one of the biggest concerns for many remote workers is missing out on the social benefits of the office – hence the need to promote a strong sense of community irrespective of employee location or arrangement.

“We do this through a program called ‘The Community’,” he explained. “Each community has a leader and team to sponsor local events, testing new ways of meeting in person as well as creating ‘virtual water cooler’ moments.

“Events range from online cooking courses and book clubs to happy hours, movie nights and comedy shows, as well as more purposeful get-togethers such as town halls, offsite meetings, and team-building occasions.”

For Brown, strong communication is key – regardless of whether an organisation is working remotely or adopting a hybrid model.

“As long as communication is present and facilitated by versatile, user-friendly technology then companies can benefit from remote or hybrid work,” he added.

Overcoming post-pandemic challenges

When executed effectively, hybrid work can provide businesses with an array of advantages, opening the door to “boundary-less collaboration” in Singapore.

With offices no longer viewed as a mission-critical necessity, employees can still be productive and connected while working remotely, in addition to boosting wellbeing and helping individuals achieve a healthier work life balance.

But such success comes with a caveat for CIOs.

“If not utilised well by businesses, hybrid working can have an adverse effect on employee wellbeing,” cautioned Yvette McEnearney, Director of Channel across APJ at GoTo. “Without the right collaboration solutions and business initiatives, employees can feel disconnected, and always being close to workstations can see a slanted work life balance as workloads increase.

“If a business’ technology stack is sub-par, then they will be under-prepared against cyber attacks, which increased exponentially with the growth of hybrid work.”

In assessing the roadblocks preventing CIOs and businesses from implementing effective hybrid work strategies in Singapore, McEnearney acknowledged the importance of prioritising company culture and employee wellbeing.

“A potential decline in company culture is possible,” she outlined. “A remote-centric organisation creates more equality in a workforce.”

“However remote workers could face several disadvantages including missing critical information after a virtual meeting has ended or being left out of the company culture by missing those ‘water cooler’ moments where employees have the chance to bond with one another.”

Furthermore, potential burnout is also a key challenge facing organisations post-pandemic, McEnearney added.

“Remote workers may work longer hours and take shorter breaks than their in-office counterparts,” she said.

“They worry that because they are out of sight, their in-office colleagues may perceive them to be slacking off, so they have a tendency to overcompensate by staying late or making themselves available outside traditional work hours.”

Specific to implementing digital transformation agendas to supercharge hybrid work strategies, CIOs are struggling to manage the “overwhelming options” available in relation to productivity tools and IT management, hampered further by escalating costs and expenses.

According to research findings, 76% of IT professionals are experiencing a “large increase” in workload because of hybrid work set-ups, with 43% accepting that IT has now become “more difficult” as a result.

Delving deeper, 31% of challenges were attributed to ineffective software, spanning frequent user errors when navigating complicated interfaces to a lack of access for off-network devices.

“Customers continue to see the value in having a strong IT team and infrastructure as they manage hybrid working challenges, so it becomes only natural that budgets and workloads have increased,” McEnearney said.

“IT teams need to ensure they have invested into solutions that are tailored to securing remote working, whilst also not capsizing their already increased workload. Therefore, it’s important for businesses to move towards consolidating their IT stack.”

As outlined by Frost & Sullivan research, organisations are beginning to understand the value of IT tools that help to simplify the challenges that IT management teams face, with 33% of businesses planning to increase investment in IT help desk and management solutions.

“Consolidated IT solutions allow employees to collaborate effectively, and IT teams to better manage challenges efficiently, whilst also being cost-effective for organisations,” McEnearney explained.

“Having the right tools for the right use case allows employees to collaborate efficiently and businesses to scale accordingly.”

Citing research findings, McEnearney said that a third of businesses (34%) believe that outsourcing help desk or other IT support functions to a managed service provider (MSP) can help in an economic downturn, a number expected to rise as CIOs increase reliance on external partners and ecosystem specialisation.

“Reducing costs is no longer the key driver for using managed services,” she explained. “The priority for organisations has shifted towards improving human connectivity and experiences.”

“Depending on which MSP a company selects, they can benefit from unique expertise and dedicated support which avoids the need to address technical problems – instead they can channel efforts into more business needs. Our go-to-market strategy is partner-first in Southeast Asia and aligns with the key outsourcing priorities of CIOs in the region.”

Building best practice with technology

As innovative CIOs deploy new technologies to maximise the benefits of hybrid work, Brown advocated the benefits of embracing “communication, collaboration and integration” as foundational pillars across an organisation. The aim? To ensure employees remain productive and connected.

“As restrictions ease, employers must take into consideration the modern employee experiences to enable and empower flexible working seamlessly and securely,” he advised.

“While these tools have served as a stop-gap measure for organisations transitioning to remote work, IT consolidation in the form of tools that handle related functions in one secure application offers much-needed relief for IT teams.”

For example, Brown said employees want flexible work arrangements to become the new normal for workplaces in Singapore, cited as a “deal breaker” for talent considering whether to join or stay with an organisation.

“However, this shift towards greater flexible work arrangements will take time to fully come into play,” he added. “For this to fully be implemented in the future, there needs to be collaboration between employers, employees and the government.”

“We’re in the age of employee empowerment. We want to do our work on our own time, on our terms, and from where we work best, whether it’s on the couch, at a cafe, or even, yes, occasionally at the office. The hybrid work model is here to stay.”

In looking ahead, Brown advised CIOs to stay connected through technology, while fostering social interactions and advocating for balance – supported by regular updates and an enhanced technology portfolio.

“Organisations should aim to leverage video technology and cloud sharing to increase seamless work efforts between team members,” he documented. “Keep remote employees engaged by fostering team connections through social hours, video chats, and virtual team-building activities.”

“Also, encourage employees to set healthy boundaries around schedules, assignments, and performance expectations.”

Furthermore, Brown stressed the importance of keeping remote workers updated on projects, goals, team progress, and company news.

“Check in regularly with remote employees for both one-on-ones and team meetings so everyone has a chance to touch base and keep their finger on the pulse of the company,” he said.

“Ensure employees feel confident and empowered to do their best work no matter where they are is key to improving engagement and performance. Whether a new hire or a veteran employee, make sure remote teams have the tools and training to get the job done.”

CIO, Remote Work

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

Next generation chatbots are now writing poetry and giving math lessons, but these smart applications have a bigger job to do. Advanced chatbots simulate human interaction via complex artificial intelligence (AI) processes, or conversational AI. As business-ready systems, conversational AI is joining mainstream tech to deliver strategic benefits to customers and employees. For companies looking to adopt or expand their use of conversational AI, there’s quite a bit to understand and consider. 

Now that humans and machines are talking to each other, decision-makers will need clarity around the capabilities—especially as they vet various products and platforms. It helps to start by defining some key terms.

Artificial intelligence (AI): A wide-ranging category of technology that allows computers to “strive to mimic human intelligence through experience and learning.”[1] Common AI applications involve analysis of language, imagery, video, and data. Machine learning (ML): In its definition of AI, Gartner cites ML as one of AI’s notable “advanced analysis and logic-based techniques,”[2] whereby computer systems can learn from their experiences without explicit programming. Natural language processing (NLP) focuses on machine reading comprehension through grammar and context, enabling it to determine the intended meaning of a sentence.  Known for applications such as voice-to-text and language translation, NLP uses AI and often ML to enable a computer to understand spoken or written human language. Natural language generation (NLG) focuses on text generation, or the construction of text in English or other languages, by a machine and based on a given dataset.Conversational AI: This advanced application of NLP is what allows people to have a spoken or written conversation with a computer system. At their best, conversational AI systems closely match human conversation—passing a measure called the Turing test.[3] Here’s how it works from a technical perspective: During the automatic speech recognition (ASR) stage, a person may ask a question and the application converts that audio waveform to text. During the NLP phase, the question is interpreted, and the device generates a smart response. Finally, the text is converted back into audio for the user during the text-to-speech (TTS) stage. 

A Quick Rundown of How Conversational AI Works

Asking a smart phone whether it’s going to rain, telling a virtual assistant to play ’90s hip hop, requesting a navigation system give directions to a new sushi restaurant—each are examples of interacting with conversational AI. By speaking in a normal voice, a person can communicate with a device that understands, finds answers, and replies with natural-sounding speech.

Conversational AI may seem simple to the end user. But the technology behind it is intricate, involving multiple steps, a massive amount of computing power, and computations that occur in less than 300 milliseconds. When an application is presented with a question, the audio waveform is converted to text in what’s known as the automatic speech recognition stage. Using NLP, the question is interpreted and a response is generated. At the next step, called text-to-speech, the text response is converted into speech signals to generate audio. 

Why Customers and Employees Prefer Conversational AI
Most people have experienced the frustration of talking to a legacy chatbot, and perhaps even resorted to anger or shouting “Representatitive!”. But once chatbots are enhanced with conversational AI capabilities, research shows customer satisfaction rates to be three times higher, attributed to shorter wait times and more accurate, consistent customer support.[4]

For employees, conversational AI can reduce stress and boost productivity by handling most low-level tasks and easing their day-to-day human-machine interactions. This frees up staff for other valuable and higher-level functions, benefiting customers and increasing morale.

Overall, for companies, the benefits may seem obvious: more productive staff and better customer service leading to increased productivity as well as higher customer satisfaction and retention rates. An additional benefit comes from the learning and training of models that continually improve and enhance employee and customer experiences.

Conversational AI in Action, From Retail to Healthcare to Real Estate

In constant search of competitive advantage, companies are increasing their investments in AI to the tune of a projected $204 billion by 2025.[5] Across industries, the technology promises to deepen customer insights, drive employee efficiency, and accelerate innovation. 

In retail, conversational AI is giving shoppers a streamlined experience with call centers and customer service interactions. As the clunky chatbots of yore are replaced with savvy AI chatbots, customers can quickly get their questions answered, receive product recommendations, find the proper digital channel for their inquiry, or connect with a human service agent. 

In healthcare, applications for conversational AI can support telehealth patient triage to identify potential medical conditions. Systems can also be trained to securely manage patient data—making it easier to access information such as test results or immunization records. And the technology can support patients who are scheduling an appointment, checking on insurance eligibility, or looking for a provider.

In real estate, conversational AI tools are being applied to the time-sensitive lead generation process, automating functions for accuracy and efficiency. Chatbots are also handling initial conversations to assess what a customer is looking to buy or sell. Given AI’s ability to handle thousands of calls per day, a program can be integrated with the customer relationship management system, or CRM, to create more positive experiences.

Five Questions to Ask Before Deploying a Conversational AI System

Once a company is ready to explore a conversational AI project, there will be groundwork. Here are five essential questions—and clues to finding the answers.

What kind of hardware do you need? The answer depends on the application scope and throughput needs. Some implementations rely on ML tools and run best on high-performance computing. Others may be more limited in scope. In any case, Dell Technologies Validated Designs offer tested and proven configurations to fit needs based on specific use cases.Which user interface options will your project support? Whether it’s a text-only chatbot or the more user-friendly voice interface, the decision must be based on what’s best for the customer and the budget.What platforms will be supported? Determine how customers might access the chatbot—via mobile app, web, social media—and think about whether to integrate with popular voice assistants. Will you build your own or rely on a vendor? Doing it in-house requires expertise and time but offers more control. If selecting a vendor, consider whether one vendor or multiple vendors will be needed for the end-to-end system. What kind of infrastructure will you need? This depends on whether the implementation will be hosted in a private or public cloud service. For those hosting in their own data centers, likely for compliance or security reasons, be sure the vendor’s systems are designed specifically to meet the speed and performance for conversational AI. 

As consumers become more familiar with AI, using it to create art and pay bills and plan their workouts, the technology holds greater professional promise. Conversational AI is already supporting a number of essential business functions—a boon for customers, staff, and the bottom line. Executives can set the foundation for their own advanced chatbots and other applications by ensuring their IT systems are ready for innovation. 

Read the Guide to Conversational AI for Financial Services, and explore AI solutions from Dell Technologies and Intel. 

IT Leadership

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By Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations, Broadcom Software

Last month at Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Fla., I enjoyed talking with ZDNet’s Chris Preimesberger and Sahana Sarma, leader of Google Cloud’s transformation advisory, about the enterprise software landscape and how it is growing more complex and business-critical daily. Transforming and modernizing software are key priorities for global organizations and critical to achieving the highest level of security and compliance. Many industries, from manufacturing, to automotive or financial service are becoming increasingly software-driven, changing their traditional portfolio mix and business models.

Here are some key points from that discussion:

Investing in R&D

At Broadcom we are seeing some of the same challenges our customers face that lead them to transform their software including: business transformation, talent risks, and managing costs. In a hyper competitive market where start-ups are challenging the established enterprises, companies are looking to pivot their business models through digital transformation. For Broadcom, who is experiencing some of the same challenges, it’s interesting to note that R&D spend has out-paced our revenue by almost 50%. That tells you quite a bit about how we approach doing our business and the importance we place on innovation.

Broadcom wasn’t originally a software company – it started in the early 1960s as the processor-making division of HP – but we got into the software business when we acquired CA Technologies and the Symantec Enterprise business. They were not modern cloud-based software companies and their portfolios were a mix of traditional on-prem software, cloud services, and some cloud-native.

One of the biggest challenges Broadcom had was to standardize platforms and processes of our acquired software companies, and so Broadcom Software worked closely with Google Cloud on this transformation journey, leading us to modernize and transform our own enterprise software. We wanted to standardize and put into a single, cloud-native platform all of our software, where it could give the biggest benefits to customers, and so it could scale, be resilient, and secure.

Continuous Innovation

With our Google Cloud journey, we’ve brought all of our software platforms onto a single SaaS platform. One of the reasons our customers want SaaS applications is that they want to see innovation happening at a faster rate. If you’re using a traditional on-prem application, you have to do upgrades and reinstalls, and it takes years to get it completed.

So as a software provider, we’ve got to deliver those SaaS apps in that space and the new features that go with them, and we need to do them in a speedy DevOps manner. Going to the cloud and modernizing (these systems) enables our developers to deliver all of this to the expectations of our customers in order to help them transform their businesses.

At Broadcom, we worked to give each of our software divisions a single pane of glass to better manage the business and track what was happening from the sales motion to customer adoption to R&D spend.  We also centralized software operations so the engineers could focus on delivering technologies that solved big, complex problems for our customers — in a way we liberated them to focus on great innovations and stronger customer experiences.

Sahana shared that at Google Cloud what they see from their customers when they transform their software is that they get to introduce more modern practices into their technology stack like containerization. So by having a more modern software stack, you can easily add in newer technologies — which introduces innovations. And by developing, adopting and promoting Open Source technologies Google Cloud ensures the neutrality of cloud and helps safeguard investments. Finally, by using Google Cloud as the backbone, you can free up software engineers to focus on new technologies and new ideas since they are not bogged down by complexities of different architectures and platforms.

Exceptional Experiences

Transforming and modernizing your software stack can help customers deliver better experiences for their customers and employees including:

Always available and auto-scalable: Clients deliver improved experience to their end customers with an always available and auto-scalable technology stack to meet customer demands with unparalleled responsiveness leveraging our fastest and safest global networkModernizing applications: Using solutions like Apigee and Anthos customers are unlocking their traditional systems to leverage the flexibility and agility of Cloud. If systems are unified, end-users can get what they need done in fewer steps. It improves the overall experience the end users have with the product or brand.AI & ML: A modernized technology stack allows them to leverage AI & ML tools, making it easier for our customers to anticipate the needs of their end-users to deliver better experience, besides significantly improving operational efficiencies

Reducing IT Complexity

Obviously the benefit of reducing IT Complexity helps customers to see a large range of benefits like faster delivery of products, improved compliance, and higher level of security when they modernize. The more complex your IT architecture is, with different platforms or silos, the more risk you introduce. By modernizing and having an open system, you can reduce IT complexity and therefore reduce risk. Most importantly, a modernized technology stack helps to quickly adapt and respond to the market, economic and customer demands. By transforming and modernizing you can lessen IT complexity and not only lower risk but deliver more success for your business and your customers.

To learn more about how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize, and protect your enterprise, contact us here.

About Andy Nallappan:

Broadcom Software

Andy is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations for Broadcom Software. He oversees the DevOps, SaaS Platform & Operations, and Marketing for the software business divisions within Broadcom.

Cloud Security, IT Leadership