Recent years have seen an increasing number of organisations realise the benefits of implementing a cloud ecosystem, with improved visibility, resource management and operational agility being just a few of the many advantages.
In fact, Gartner predicts that 85 per cent of enterprises will adopt a cloud-first strategy by 2025. Those who do not will be at a disadvantage, predicts Jay Snyder, senior vice president of partners and alliances at Dynatrace.
“If you cannot keep up with the pace, you’re going to fall behind,” he says. “We are seeing companies going from zero to superhero across all industries and disrupting long-established businesses after adopting cloud technologies. In other words, it’s not the big that will eat the small, but the fast that will conquer the slow.”
So, how can organisations keep up with the competition and maximise the value of their cloud ecosystem? One way is to enhance their cloud environments with artificial intelligence.
“It all comes down to your ability to make money, save money, and reduce risk,” says Snyder. “To do this, you must optimise the allocation of resources, including technologies and people, which can be achieved using data-driven insights powered by AI. This technology seems to be omnipresent nowadays, and it is playing a transformational role in how organisations manage, analyse and derive value from their data.”
However, to maintain this lead, it is essential for businesses to have unified observability and security, adds Snyder. “Organisations need a single pane of glass to troubleshoot and proactively foresee problems across a complex maze of systems and software.”
This is where the Dynatrace observability and security platform, combined with the Microsoft product ecosystem, can help.
“Our partnership goes beyond just working together,” says Snyder. “By partnering with Dynatrace and Microsoft, you can leverage the expertise and resources of two companies rooted in deep technological innovation and access solutions that allow your organisation to quickly adopt modern technology. Our platform is available on Microsoft Azure, and we utilise all the Azure OpenAI services to enhance our offerings and deliver an improved customer experience.”
Two Dynatrace platform capabilities include Davis AI and the Grail data lakehouse. Davis provides customers with AI-powered insights into data using a power-of-three approach, which combines predictive, causal and generative AI. Grail provides a unified data lakehouse with massively parallel processing to deliver contextual root-cause data analysis at scale. These technologies are integrated into a customer’s Microsoft ecosystem.
One customer that has benefited from the Dynatrace-Microsoft partnership is OneStream, which provides a cloud-based platform for finance management.
The firm needed a full-stack solution that was scalable in the cloud. Dynatrace, with its native support for Azure and AI-powered observability platform approach, offered capabilities they were looking for.
Following deployment, OneStream’s engineering team proactively improved the performance of its platform by optimising Azure resource allocation and identifying any issues before new versions were shipped. As a result, the organisation now expects to see seven-figure dollar savings over the next 12 months.
“OneStream is also seeing significant improvements in efficiency and productivity among its employees thanks to the Dynatrace platform providing them with a single pane of glass that unifies their business and simplifies their Azure environment,” says Snyder. “In turn, this has also improved customer satisfaction and made it easier to respond to any critical issues.”
There is no sign of cloud innovation slowing down, and Snyder expects the pace at which companies adopt AI and machine learning will only accelerate. “The technology will improve, use cases will expand and comfort levels will grow, all of which will improve innovation, profits, efficiency and security as a result.”
However, Snyder foresees two key challenges facing organisations.
“The first is what I call data overload,” he says. “The faster organisations develop, the more data needs to be collected and analysed. This means they will eventually face challenges in distinguishing actionable insights from the noise, leading to alert fatigue and missed issues.
“Secondly, there is a skill shortage developing as the pace of technological evolution outpaces the availability of skilled professionals.”
To combat these challenges, Snyder believes that organisations “need to design their solutions with the customer at the centre of the conversation, so when they use tools like AI, it is implemented for maximum impact”.
Furthermore, Snyder suggests businesses should take advantage of enablement services offered by Dynatrace and Microsoft.
“Many of our partners offer a build-operate-transfer model, where they help you build solutions, transfer the skills to your team and then let you manage it on your own,” he says. “Ultimately, that’s our goal, delivering significant business value at pace for our customers.”
Discover more insights like this in the Autumn 2024 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox!