Design and Architect for Change

IT is the product

IT is moving rapidly from an organization that automates and integrates value chains across their company and partners, to an organization that drives core business strategy. IT builds and defines infrastructure, processes, services and applications to connect to customers in unparalleled ways.

The network now must meet the demanding needs of these customer connected applications and services; this is a critical paradigm shift. IT is designing and architecting for change. Virtualization of compute, storage and network provides the fabric to enable rapid change, meeting the unpredictable needs of the business and dealing with the unknown.

The network now must meet the demanding needs of these customer connected applications and services; this is a critical paradigm shift.

If IT cannot deliver on these requirements, lines of business (LOB) will inevitably work around them. They will be forced to innovate across the complete technology stack, creating potentially unsustainable infrastructure without the governance and oversight necessary to create secure, reliable, and cost efficient solutions. This presents a fantastic opportunity for IT to play a more strategic role than ever to the business. IT must drive the enterprise’s core strategy.

IT is now the product.

Design and architect for change

Network infrastructures are often designed to address long-lived services. It is difficult to predict capacity, as compute is distributed from the center to the edge. As such, the hardware is hardened and sized to support anticipated loads and threats, reacting when change is needed. This leads to significant redesign and re-architecture costs when modifications to infrastructure are required. Meeting unpredictable business requirements at a predictable cost is impossible with a rigid infrastructure.

We fundamentally believe that DDI becomes increasingly critical as infrastructure changes more rapidly.

Designing and architecting for change requires new technology, new processes, new skill sets, and often new organizational structures that emphasize cross functional teams challenging any infrastructure that cannot adapt rapidly to new requirements. The primary goal is to enable users that are not experts, to easily and securely make changes to infrastructure to provision their services, while meeting the security, reliability, and governance requirements.

We fundamentally believe that DDI becomes increasingly critical as infrastructure changes more rapidly. One of our customers grew from 50 administrators making changes through our user interface daily, to 2000 users, effortlessly making up to 6000 changes an hour through our API.  Our customers are building massive cloud presence and delivering products as a service to their customers. This cannot be accomplished through help desk tickets, or even self-service portals. Automation towards the LOB from the supporting infrastructure is key to coping with change.

It would be disingenuous of us to state that the products we have proudly built and delivered to our customers over the last decade meet all of the requirements of rapidly changing IT requirements. The requirements of our customers have changed and so are we. We see this as a massive opportunity for innovation. We will be launching new capabilities, new business models, and complementary products in order to deliver our customers’ requirements: flexible, open, and adaptive DDI that can meet the needs of the data center, the cloud, and the edge.

We will be launching new capabilities, new business models, and complementary products in order to deliver our customers’ requirements: flexible, open, and adaptive DDI that can meet the needs of the data center, the cloud, and the edge.

The hardware barrier

Network infrastructure has traditionally been delivered as purpose-built hardware appliances, despite the fact appliances add cost and can be difficult to maintain. Service requirements that cannot be met with software running on commodity compute or virtual environments create inherent inflexibility as capacity cannot be moved to optimize services. This then creates barriers to achieving a scalable, flexible and highly resilient network infrastructure.

Hardware becomes obsolete. Customers need to purchase updated hardware in order to maintain support. If customers require us to introduce new capabilities, driven by hardware, there are benefits to over and above supportability. However, this three to five year hardware refresh cycle has historically been used by the industry (BlueCat included), as an opportunity to require customers to essentially re-buy the entire product. This is a disservice to our customers. The cost of hardware refresh should be directly related to the value to the customer: supportable hardware. The most aggressive vendors push this identical refresh practice for virtual appliances as well. BlueCat is different.

BlueCat is a software company

We will deliver software-only and cloud-native solutions that are no longer part of an appliance so that we can horizontally scale, optimize to meet SLAs, and adapt to service interruptions.

BlueCat is a software company. We license and support our software separately from the appliance. We deliver our software solutions on hardware that is optimized for performance, with industry leading quality, for those customers that want to buy it as a hardware appliance. We provide transparency to the cost of the hardware and reduce the cost of staying current. For customers who don’t want to buy our hardware, we will continue to innovate to create more deployment options. There is no cost to switch from hardware appliances to virtual appliances. We will announce support for commodity hardware so that our customers can choose platforms that they have already achieved support in scale. We will deliver software-only and cloud-native solutions that are no longer part of an appliance so that we can horizontally scale, optimize to meet SLAs, and adapt to service interruptions.

The DDI market needs to be disrupted to maximize enterprise value. BlueCat will lead the way.