Three Key Takeaways from Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IOCS) Conferences
In early December, the 2022 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IOCS) Conference convened in Las Vegas, Nevada. Each year, the annual three-day event brings together enterprise tech and business leadership teams to connect face-to-face with Gartner experts, peers and a wide array of solution providers to discuss and explore industry-shaping insights. This year's focus was on empowering the anywhere business through enhanced customer experiences and changes to staff and skills to build resilient, sustainable, secure, and reliable operations.
This year, fellow members of the Rocket Software team and I headed to Las Vegas to attend the conference in person. Gartner IOCS provided many of our leaders – including Phil Buckellew, Tim Willging, and Jeff Cherrington – an excellent opportunity to engage with customers, partners and prospects eager to learn from peers and Gartner experts. It also gave us a chance to reflect on what we're learning from our interactions with customers, partners and thought leaders.
Here are three key takeaways from Gartner IOCS 2022:
1. Hybrid cloud journeys are becoming more "mature."
No one could walk around the venue without overhearing some form of messaging around hybrid cloud. While we heard presentations for wholesale migrations to the cloud from hyper-scalers claiming seamless paths to cloud migration from on-premise, the overarching sentiment from enterprises throughout the event was dissatisfaction with their current positioning and support. Leaders and attendees we spoke with, highlighted their path to a more mature approach – identifying the right platform for the right workload, including maintaining mission-critical workloads on mainframe systems.
2. There was an increased focus on managing data flows along hybrid-cloud environments.
The focal point in most of our hybrid-cloud discussions centered around managing the flow of data to cloud in support of analytics use cases. In order to build out more intelligent algorithms to detect fraud, assess risks and optimize transaction flows demands more data--most of which currently resides in today's highly secure, almost locked-down on-premise systems. Unlocking that data securely to feed cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) training engines and applying those engines to transaction processing on-premise, including along the mainframe, has shown promise in enabling firms to differentiate in today's complex digital business environment.
3. Mainframe modernization, not migration, has become the priority.
Gartner's Dennis Smith discussed how today's reliance on mainframe systems to host critical applications and workloads continues to exceed expectations. Conversations with senior I&O leaders and CTOs show that priorities have shifted from mainframe migration to mainframe modernization that includes a highly selective approach to determining what does and does not get migrated to distributed or cloud platforms.
Our Premier Exhibitor experience at the IOCS event – a first for Rocket Software – gave us the chance to share our story and how Rocket is bringing greater innovation to simplify modernization and hybrid cloud journeys. We’re excited to be at the forefront of modernization, enabling enterprises to embrace more mature approaches to hybrid cloud with open tools, innovative workload management and automation capabilities. We’re also excited about what’s ahead as we continue to work with CTOs and senior leaders of I&O, uncovering how they embrace hybrid to securely unlock volumes of data residing on complex databases and systems, feedback the “scale out” AI and ML capability of cloud providers to build algorithms and enrich their secure and reliable transaction processing engines to differentiate and deliver new value to their customers.
Gartner IOCS was an exhilarating experience. If we missed you at the event, please visit our modernization page to learn more about Rocket Software's commitment to enabling enterprises to modernize without disruption.
