In a blog post last summer, we discussed how IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat would help organizations embrace hybrid cloud.
But enhanced hybrid cloud implementation isn’t the only benefit of pairing Big Blue and Red Hat. To quantify the positive impacts, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct an emerging Total Economic Impact (TEI) technology assessment study to examine how customers utilize solutions by both companies in tandem and the impacts achieved.
Forrester interviewed five organizations that use IBM and Red Hat offerings together.
Because the range of possible ways to utilize both IBM and Red Hat solutions is vast, the specific benefits and key performance indicators (KPIs) will vary widely. The study identified four key categories of benefits that encompass the myriad of specific impacts seen by each organization:
- Infrastructure savings
- Workforce productivity
- Acceleration
- Enhanced business outcomes
An interesting finding in the study is that the interviewed companies faced common challenges, as legacy monolithic applications and complex infrastructure led to excess costs, wasted IT labor, and poor developer experiences. Among the challenges:
Infrastructure issues. Availability and performance issues negatively impacted users and required excessive labor to resolve. Visibility and management were very limited, as environments often needed to be overprovisioned to handle peak loads. Ultimately, lacking resources and inflexible architectures held organizations back.
Skill gaps. Legacy applications and infrastructure often required niche skill sets, making it difficult to find the needed specialists. Even when pre-existing specialized skills weren’t required, organizations struggled to attract and retain employees who were interested and willing to work on these legacy environments. As years went by, this became increasingly risky as the organizations could not adequately keep applications running, let alone update or enhance them.
Impaired agility. Manual processes, monolithic applications, legacy architecture, and limited management capabilities slowed development to a crawl. Organizations wasted significant labour just to keep the lights on, let alone meet quickly evolving market pressures and customer needs. Desires for new and enhanced offerings were quickly squashed.
If those challenges sound familiar, it could be time to contact LRS IT Solutions to ask about using Big Blue and Red Hat together.
You can also learn more about the study by downloading The Total Economic Impact of Using IBM and Red Hat Solutions Together assessment brief here.