IT industry faces a sea change with the collapse of IT silos and a ‘brave new software defined world’ where automation is key

Graham Brown, managing director of IT infrastructure specialist Gyrocom, believes there’s a major sea change on its way as the deployment of software defined data centres and infrastructure accelerates in 2016.
‘2015 was an important year for the software defined concept. It was the first year that we saw there was a real market in terms of business to be won and we had some significant successes. Until that point we were educating our customers. What is clear is that companies must prepare to deliver in a different way. The old models of doing things are potentially already dead and not everyone has quite got to grips with this yet.
‘There is going to be a lot more generalisation and less specialisation so we’ll see the collapse of IT silos. We’ll see more dedicated resources for virtualisation. Dedicated resources for hardware, networking storage etc will be consolidated. We need to understand the entire landscape in a software defined world. The requirement for automation is the real currency in a scarce skills market, and the people who can enable organisations to deliver faster and smarter are going to be the rockstars of the IT industry.’
As part of this need Gyrocom has recently partnered with Puppet Labs. Puppet automates the entire software delivery process, from provisioning through testing, production release and updates.
‘Automation of infrastructure; being able to do in minutes that which previously took months to do is going to be a key focus. Puppet is a common language allowing us to step across all the different areas – it’s the piece that brings the infrastructure together. We’ve got pockets of automation with our relationship with VMWare. Puppet Labs allows us to integrate into that. ‘It provides the common language that has the potential to speak across all of the silos. It’s an exciting time.’
John Leon, director of alliances at Puppet, said, ‘With over a decade of experience in IT infrastructure, Gyrocom recognises the value of moving customers towards a more automated approach that leverages DevOps tooling and practices. In this respect, they fit the “perfect partner profile” for Puppet.’