The 2018 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (GartnerIOCS) was held at the Venetian in Las Vegas in early December. Nearly 3,000 attendees, including members of the Expedient team, participated and learned about new trend analysis in cloud and IT infrastructure. Guided by the latest impartial Gartner research, and input from infrastructure & operations leaders from companies in a variety of industries, the event explores what makes a successful strategy - from cloud to IoT to artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning.
Attendees at GartnerIOCS learned how to accelerate innovation and agility in a hybrid world and enable a digital future. Built on forward-thinking infrastructure & operations research, the 2018 conference provided hand-on, how-to advice. A significant theme of this year’s conference was that computing workloads will continue to operate in hybrid configurations in clouds, data centers, and at the edge. The diversity of available options will require coordination and operational excellence to gain the necessary business agility to digitally transform. Gartner summarized this theme based upon the idea that “infrastructure is everywhere” and suggested that these are the primary factors organizations should consider:
- Agility Thrives on Diversity - the combination of experience possessed by infrastructure and operations leaders make them the right arbiter of the variety of options available.
- Applications Enable Change - infrastructure and operations leaders should engage with all of their stakeholders in order to deliver services and products that support application reliability.
- Boundaries are Shifting - the lines between physical and digital are blurred and the data center is no longer “the center of data” - enterprise infrastructures are being extended into the cloud and to the edge.
- People are the Cornerstone - versatile skills and experience will gain preference over singular focus on one technical specialty as the nature of work continues to evolve and require adaptation to new behavior.
More than 100 technology vendors exhibited at the conference, several of whom Expedient partners with for components of our solutions. Multiple sessions featured VMware, including two that highlighted the VMware Cloud on AWS solution and the VMware Cloud Verified software-defined data center accreditation - both of which Expedient participates in. Supporting clients’ current and future hybrid IT needs is a core focus for the Expedient strategy and product teams. We’ll continue to monitor Gartner research to validate and influence our approach to solution development and ensure alignment with client needs.
As Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Jonathan Rosenson is responsible for overseeing organizational functions that drive growth at Expedient. Jon additionally acts as an external spokesperson conveying the Expedient story. Follow him on Twitter.
