Digital Transformation: An Opportunity of Choice

As we head into a new year, we must keep a pulse on how technologies are evolving—and how technology partnerships will enable new opportunities. For today’s blog, let’s look at the state of the hyperscale and hybrid cloud to help paint a picture of what is to come in the months ahead.

To start, we see some companies are switching to hyperscale cloud computing for faster speeds, reduced downtime, and more. This is also driven by the rise of AI (artificial intelligence), big data, machine learning, and the IoT (Internet of Things).

Grandview Research suggests the hyperscale computing market size was valued at $56.83 billion in 2022 and it is expected to expand 23.9% from 2023 to 2030.

Additionally, we see the hybrid cloud market is also growing, due to the rise of digital transformation across many companies. Combining an on-prem data center with a public cloud in the hybrid-cloud computing environment gives companies flexibility, while still improving efficiency and productivity for businesses, and reducing costs.

Allied Market Research suggests the hybrid cloud market size was valued at $96.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $480.2 billion by 2033, growing at a rate of 17.4% from 2024 to 2033.

Certainly, many companies are experiencing this firsthand today. But what is really exciting is 2024 brought some big announcements that will lead to greater choice in 2025 and beyond.

A Case Study

Let’s consider the example of Komatsu, which is a manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, and a customer of both IBM and Microsoft.

Michelle Pellegrin, global VP and managing director of strategic partnerships, IBM, tells me about how the Komatsu team has focused on the public cloud and began migrating more of their on-prem workloads to Microsoft Azure.

“They knew they couldn’t sustain more of the traditional manual approach, so they needed to be more proactive and manage performance issues and reduce waste and their spend, etc.,” Pellegrin explains.

Ultimately, Komatsu leveraged IBM Turbonomic as a hybrid cloud, cost-optimization solution and the company is running it on Azure. Of course, this is simply one example. Many companies have found Microsoft and IBM’s partnership offering an opportunity of choice.

“At its core, the IBM and Microsoft partnership are focused around, for IBM, offering our clients choice. Full stop,” says Pellegrin.

Some very big announcements from the two companies spanned this past year. Pellegrin provides a glimpse into some of the highlights from IBM Think and Microsoft Ignite in 2024, and a few of the big announcements that came throughout the year.

At IBM Think 2024 in May, IBM announced the IBM watsonx AI and data platform is supported by IBM to run on Microsoft Azure and available to purchase through IBM. Just before the Microsoft Ignite event in the fall, IBM made another big announcement—that it is bringing the Apptio product portfolio of EAP (enterprise agile planning), IT financial management, and cloud FinOps solutions to Microsoft Azure.

“(Ignite) showed to us the absolute need for our customers to figure out their costs, their planning, how to optimize their cloud spend, where do they need to look moving forward, and Apptio allows them to do that,” says Pellegrin.

At the end of the day, choice will be essential for companies looking to deploy technologies in 2025 and beyond. This is simply one example of how choice is playing out.

Want to tweet about this article? Use hashtags #IoT #sustainability #AI #5G #cloud #edge #futureofwork #digitaltransformation #green #ecosystem #environmental #circularworld #hyperscale #hybridcloud #IBMPartner

The post Digital Transformation: An Opportunity of Choice first appeared on Connected World.