Interview: How going digital can drive business innovation and value

Canopy was formed in 2012 through a joint venture between industry storage and virtualization partners EMC and VMware. Based in Europe, Canopy offers a complete cloud portfolio including tailored solutions across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to enable governments and enterprises to transform their IT in the digital era.

Canopy's global headquarters are in London and it operates in nine countries across three continents. We spoke to Canopy CTO Sean Catalin about how the company is helping businesses transform themselves in the digital era.

TechRadar Pro: What distinguishes Canopy's offerings in the cloud service market?

Sean Catlin: Canopy is in a unique position to offer end-to-end cloud services including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and consultancy taking advantage of the technologies and expertise of leading joint venture partners Atos, EMC and VMware.

Ultimately, Canopy helps customers select the right cloud platform today to support their journey to transform into digital businesses in future. Canopy brings substantial benefits to its customers such as IT cost reduction and reduced capex expenditure through flexible pricing models plus access to innovative and agile technology that can enable rapid cloud implementation and faster time to market for products and services.

Canopy offerings are based on open standards so customers can choose their preferred technology and decide whether to run solutions off or on-premise to best meet their business needs.

TRP: How is Canopy helping customers transform themselves into digital businesses?

SC: The digital economy has changed the stakes for business, and companies that are embracing it are likely to lead their respective industries and be more agile than their competitors. Canopy is empowering businesses to go digital with its latest offerings such as – Cloud Fabric, which provides a platform to develop new applications in the cloud, and Canopy Compose which enables organisations to transfer legacy applications to the cloud.

Both help drive business innovation through software by enabling organisations to move from fewer large application updates per year to smaller updates delivered much more frequently. Not only does this approach reduce costs, it improves agility by allowing businesses to grow on demand, reduces time to market, and ultimately allows companies to deliver new and better digital experiences for customers or citizens.

The digital world requires two speed thinking – both IT Speed and Digital Speed. Digital Speed is an agile culture and approach, thinking in timescales of days and weeks rather than months and years when creating new applications, and quickly turning ideas into working concepts. Digital speed is also about the acceptance of uncertainty, and designing and delivering solutions that are enhanced rather than undermined by changing circumstances.

To reap the benefits of digital, senior management will need to re-imagine the entire organisation - including products, services and the way that they are used to communicate with other businesses. Canopy provides consultancy to help firms cross the chasm of traditional IT supply and formulate a digitally-led IT strategy. With support from the right external cloud vendor to put this process into operation, the migration period can be pain-free for all involved.

TRP: Enterprises are facing pressure to reinvent themselves as digital businesses while consistently delivering new and better digital experiences for their customers. How should businesses begin to tackle this pressure?

SC: The trend of organisations reinventing themselves digitally has been branded 'the digital dragon' by Gartner. It refers to the radical digital disruption that most industries around the world are undergoing. To tame the digital dragon organisations need to harness the power of big data, mobile and social applications delivered in the cloud. In short, they need to excel at developing and delivering great software that offers superior digital experiences to their customers, and do that sustainably faster than their competitors.

With so many different providers in the marketplace offering to provide cloud-enabled digital services, selecting the right partner can be daunting for business decision makers. Firstly, organisations need to consider functionality.

Will a particular cloud provider be able to offer them the right 'class' of service, and can they advise them on the right cloud platform that is most suited for their business, for instance hybrid cloud? Other considerations include assessing whether the cost models and performance models are the right fit for their business with appropriate SLAs in place. Senior IT professionals also need to think about other factors including the workflow, access, control, authorisation, auditing and reporting processes.

TRP: As companies become digital businesses, they will naturally gain more data. How can this data be commercialised so that companies can take advantage of this? E.g. become more predictive.

SC: As the value and volume of an organisation's data changes over time, IT professionals must manage it accordingly, choosing to retire or archive appropriate data sets, or ultimately remove them altogether. But when all that data lives in a private cloud or hybrid cloud environment, it adds a host of extra challenges around Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

Traditional operational structured data sources are being augmented with social, web, government, as well as historically hard to use enterprise 'dark' data (unstructured document libraries and archives) and vast volumes of machine generated data (sensor and log data).

Modern ILM strategies involve a multi-tiered approach to handling data primarily for cost management reasons. Crucial factors in this decision making process are the availability of data, performance, back-up and recovery, and price. Companies must also find a provider with the appropriate ILM and security tools, but ones which don't compromise the ease at which data can be stored and extracted.

A balance also needs to be struck between tiers, such as with mission-critical applications and older records. Archived data can be stored on slower cheaper storage. For business critical apps, trust and control are important considerations. Furthermore, the speed at which companies can access their real-time data and archived data will have an effect on how data can be used in the commercial business model.

The more localised the data, the faster companies will be able to access it. The IT department needs to understand the controls required by the business, what controls are already in place, and then identify the control weaknesses before putting a remediation plan into action to fix those weaknesses. Understanding where and when to put business critical apps in the cloud will become even more important in 2014-15 as businesses undertake pilot projects for business functions.

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