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CIOs and OpenShift
CIOs have one of the most exciting - yet difficult - jobs in today’s business. Just look at how much technology surrounds us. With each piece of technology there’s a company designing it, producing it, shipping it, and maintaining it. The CIO is the one in charge of not just the technology itself, but also the people who create and maintain that technology. Top that off with the turbulent and rapid pace of technological change and it's easy to see what kind of pressure today’s CIOs are under. So why are they feeling this pressure and how can OpenShift help?
Distributed application systems, like OpenShift, are important because software is disrupting traditional businesses and determining today’s market leaders. Whether it's a new ride-sharing application or media streaming service, consumers are deserting traditional methods and migrating towards more convenient and accessible software applications. Think about it, how many times have you opted to buy something online instead of going to your local retailer and buying in person? Or used something like Uber or Lyft instead of calling a cab? The truth is that software is how companies are finding new business opportunities and providing value to their customers. And software is how companies are distinguishing themselves from their competition and winning market share.
It’s easy to think, “My business isn’t a tech company, so I’m not affected.” The fact is that’s simply not true. Companies like Amazon, Uber, Netflix, and many more have showed us that traditional industries like retail, transportation, and media can be turned over to newer, more agile technology companies. Here’s another perspective: think about where Kodak would be today if they were the ones who created Instagram. They would have been able to avoid bankruptcy, capitalize on the social media, and remain relevant in the consumer marketplace. All by making the choice to include software into their business model.
However, creating that next big idea is no easy task. So how are CIOs supposed to be innovative when they're spending most of their time allocating scarce resources, finding ways to improve ROI/ROA, and oversee implementation of technology? The answer is actually pretty simple.
OpenShift accelerates application development by including the tools that companies need to be agile and efficient. With OpenShift, your business can deploy applications quickly, become less siloed, be more interactive, and increase collaboration. You’ll be able to go from concept to production faster and ahead of your competition.
Speed
Michael Porter once said, “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.” Which means your innovation strategy and how fast you can execute it is going to determine whether you’re prosperous or not. When you embrace OpenShift, you gain full control over your pace of innovation. Your team becomes a team of enabled decision makers instead of hindered individuals.
With OpenShift, developers have access to a self-service platform that allows them to create, modify, and deploy applications on demand with the click of a button. These new applications are packaged up in containers which makes them extremely lightweight and portable. Plus, applications on OpenShift can be created in virtually any language/framework/DB and best of all, run at that same operational cost.
This means that your next line-of-business application can get from concept to production faster. And do so in a much more systematic approach then what’s probably being done in your environment today.
Organizational Consensus
OpenShift allows both Dev and Ops to work together without having to sacrifice their individual concerns. We’ve already gone over how developers can create, modify, and deploy applications on demand and use the languages they prefer, but Operations needs to be able to maintain those applications easily and have them run at the appropriate scale. OpenShift enables them to do that with little to no manual intervention. Plus, OpenShift is built on a stable operating system (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) that 90% of the Fortune 500 companies trust and depend on.
OpenShift brings consensus to your IT organization. Meaning that your organization can be more strategic as well as nimble and can deliver applications to market while maintaining them over their lifecycle with the scalability and stability necessary to win.
Holistic Solution
IT organizations need a vendor that can enable them through the entire stack, not just one aspect of it. Having a PaaS environment that’s coupled together with supported IaaS services and middleware services, means better agility and interoperability. With our solution, you can incorporate OpenStack, JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Mobile, and others. All of which is backed and supported by Red Hat, whose products and solutions power 50% of the world's trading volume.
Scale
Being able to deliver that next big idea is one thing, being able to run it at scale is another. OpenShift leverages the power of containers and a incredibly powerful orchestration engine to make that happen. Containers make sure that applications are packed up in their own space and are independent from the OS, this makes applications incredibly portable and hyper scalable. OpenShift's orchestration layer, Google’s Kubernetes, automates the scheduling and replication of these containers meaning that they’re highly available and able to accommodate whatever your users can throw at it.
This means that your team spends less time in the weeds and keeping the lights on, and more time being innovative and productive. OpenShift is more than a PaaS, it’s a robust distributed application system that increases operational efficiency while still being able to handle the external load created by your customers.
Security
The data of your organization is one of your most valuable assets so why trust that with just anyone? In fact, 100% of U.S. government executive departments (DOD, DHS, DOT, etc.) use Red Hat solutions. We know how valuable data is and we understand the importance of protecting it from harm. OpenShift is built on those same principles and applications running on OpenShift have their own “container”allowing for the code and data to separated from each other by default.
So whether you’re in the software game already or working towards evolving your business to compete in this software driven economy, think about who can provide you with the speed, portability, choice and security necessary to dominate the market and become that next industry leader.
