In April 2021, Gartner coined the term digital platform conductor (DPC) tool, referring to the ‘rise of tools that enable I&O leaders to strategically manage across their infrastructure, regardless of environment or location.’ Fast forward 18 months, and the company is seeing a growing need for DPC capabilities to manage IT digital infrastructure complexity. Now it has published the first ‘Market Guide for Digital Platform Conductor Tools’, and has recognized ReadyWorks as a ‘Representative Vendor in the DPC Tools Market’.
The growing need for a digital platform conductor
IT estate complexity has grown dramatically over the last few years and the trend is expected to continue. End users are increasingly dispersed across multiple locations and home offices, IT is supporting a greater mix of devices, and most teams are managing the ongoing transition to public and private clouds. In addition, employee retention has becomes a priority and cyberattacks continue to rise, presenting teams with more challenges.
IT maturity is a key priority for CIOs. The cloud offers new flexibility and efficiencies along with new capabilities for digital workplace orchestration, such as digital experience (DEX) monitoring and cybersecurity asset management (CSAM). But, as you add these capabilities, you’re also adding to the number of hybrid digital infrastructure management (HDIM) tools you must interact with.
While these tools are designed to manage distinct areas of your IT estate, they aren’t designed to interact with each other. This results in information silos, making it hard to gain a cohesive view and achieve maximum value from infrastructure investments. As you add more tools, you’ll need more headcount to manage and coordinate activities between them.
Using a DPC to cut through complexity
This is where a digital platform conductor excels. A DPC reduces IT complexity and risk, and ensures data accuracy for all your IT change programs. It does this by connecting to and orchestrating all your existing IT management tools, as well as any other data source you rely on.
A DPC analyzes information about the entire IT estate – endpoints, users, applications, and all their interdependencies – defines the rules for change, and uses intelligent automation to implement those changes. It provides IT teams with a holistic view of the environment, how future changes will impact that environment, and how and when those changes should be made so that users and business operations are not adversely impacted.
How a DPC can benefit your organization?
“By 2026, 75% of DPC tool adopters will be consistently successful at demonstrating I&O business value, versus 25% of nonadopters.”
- Gartner
Because a digital platform conductor sits above and connects to your HDIM tools, as your organization grows, both in size and capabilities, a DPC will grow with you, connecting to the new tools you implement and continuing to reduce IT complexity as well as the risk, effort and cost of managing change. You can use a DPC to cut the time and effort of managing your large-scale initiatives, including:
Digital Workplace Orchestration: A DPC will seamlessly incorporate new capabilities you introduce to enhance the workplace experience and empower your teams to work from anywhere, over any device. It connects to the tools required to manage them, giving them access to the information they need to function. For example, you can use a DPC in conjunction with digital experience monitoring tools, leveraging performance data to trigger automated workflows to address issues that affect the end user experience. These workflows include opening service requests, orchestrating system and human tasks, communications with end users, and reporting.
Data Center Migration Orchestration: A DPC drastically reduces data discovery cycles by automatically collecting and analyzing information from multiple data sources and people and coordinates tasks across your HDIM tools, including, planning, scheduling, and rollout. A DPC also streamlines reporting, giving you access to real time progress reports and stats to share with stakeholders.
Edge and IoT Orchestration: Remove the risk of haphazard growth and security vulnerabilities as more operations are digitalized. Using a DPC you can incorporate and manage new IoT devices and applications connected to the edge cloud into your IT estate as they are introduced.
The essential capabilities required by a successful DPC
As highlighted in the Gartner Market Guide, ReadyWorks is a digital platform conductor and it offers a breadth of capabilities that align with the ‘essential capabilities’ Gartner says are required for a successful DPC, including:
- Application Workload Assignment: Access a holistic view of your applications from disparate tool and determine where applications should be processed using analytics based on your business requirements. Use the orchestration capabilities of a DPC to automate the workflows required to deploy or move the application to where it needs to be.
- Service Enablement: Orchestrate multiple HDIM tools to automate workloads that manage individual requests, such as cloud provisioning, as well as the complex coordination needs of a large-scale program such as deploying thousands of computers to end users’ homes.
- Cost Management & Resource Optimization: Automate communications to owners to reconcile duplications in data or complete missing information, and to request additional information, with all feedback incorporated automatically into the database. Analyze your IT estate for example, for license harvesting or to understand the cost of idle equipment. Incorporate future business needs into your current view of usage to inform future spending.
- Governance, Risk and Compliance: With a complete view of your IT estate, you can monitor vulnerabilities and use a DPC orchestration to remove them. Easily access reports showing clear trails for audits or compliance purposes.
ReadyWorks is helping companies around the world to deliver IT change faster, with less cost and risk.
Book a demo to understand how ReadyWorks can cut through your growing IT complexity and reduce the time, cost, and effort of all your IT change programs.
