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Digital Platform Conductor

The term "Digital Platform Conductor" (DPC) describes an emerging technology market currently forming to meet the needs of I&O leaders struggling to deliver consistent business value across their increasingly complex on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. It provides complete visibility across an IT estate, drastically lightens management workloads through workflow automation and orchestration, and extracts tangible business value from IT investments.

 

Here we define what a Digital Platform Conductor is, what purpose it serves, and how it simplifies the management of the Digital Workplace.

Juriba_DPC_Schematic

What is a Digital Platform Conductor (DPC)?

Gartner's Market Guide defines Digital Platform Conductors (DPC) as a tool that coordinates the various infrastructure tools used to plan, implement, operate, and monitor underpinning technology and services for applications and digital products.

In its 2022 market guide, Gartner further describes the new technology market as follows - slightly paraphrased:

Digital Platform Conductors (DPC) provides I&O leaders with a unified, holistic view of their digital infrastructure and dependent applications by coordinating different Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management (HDIM) tools. A DPC tool not only allows I&O leaders to plan, implement, operate, and monitor underpinning technology and services on a tactical level but, furthermore, enables them to evaluate the IT assets' contribution to business value regardless of the environments used or their owners, thus providing input into strategic I&O decision-making to get better value from infrastructure. They may be delivered as on-premises, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. 

Before diving into the key capabilities and requirements of Digital Platform Conductors (DPC) tools, it is crucial to understand the reasons behind their emergence and the specific challenges they address for I&O leaders. By delving into these aspects, we can gain valuable insights into how DPCs can support infrastructure management and provide effective solutions to existing problems.

“By 2026, 75% of DPC tool adopters will be consistently successful at demonstrating I&O business value, versus 25% of nonadopters.”

DPCs enable I&O leaders to unlock the value of existing and future hybrid digital infrastructure investments.

Enterprises and large organizations are under pressure to drive digital transformation initiatives, provide outstanding customer and employee experiences, and increase their agility to react to changing customer demand faster to remain competitive, all while facing talent shortages, global supply chain issues, inflation, and cost-saving requirements. As a digital business, organizations are becoming more dependent on infrastructure, causing them to create digital infrastructure supply chains by implementing hybrid digital infrastructure consisting of multiple interactive and interdependent on-premises and cloud environments.

 

These have become so intertwined and complex that it is almost impossible for Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders, who are increasingly responsible for managing hybrid digital infrastructure, to discern whether and how these deliver business value and communicate it clearly to business stakeholders. This is due to various factors. For one, the boundaries between IT Operations Management (ITOM) tools, including Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), IT Asset Management (ITAM), and IT Asset Monitoring, are blurring, and DevOps as a continuous approach pushes the more traditional boundaries (a.k.a. siloed) ways of managing implementation, service delivery, and monitoring. In addition, IT service delivery outcomes have increasingly become dependent on how well you can coordinate between your different systems.

Experience the power of the Juriba DPC.

Juriba is the only Digital Platform Conductor engineered specifically for the complex needs of Digital Workplace leaders in large enterprises, and is already the choice for forward-thinking teams in 5 out of 10 of the world's largest organizations, and 8 out of 10 of the world's leading System Integrators.

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Gartner's DPC requirements

According to Gartner, a DPC tool must have some, if not most, of these capabilities

(as this is a very new market, no vendor will meet all listed requirements):

GartnerDPC

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    Workload Assignment. Assign/modify where app workloads are processed based on requirements, capacity, and cost dynamics.

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    Service Enablement. Provide a single point of entry and reporting for the digital platform resource requests.

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    Value Monitoring & Observability. Provide HDI-based compliance, value, and other estimates based on aggregated data from analysis tools & data feeds.

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    Technology Inventory & Classification. Get an inventory of IT assets and dependencies aligned with changes to them.

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    Cost Management & Resource Optimization. Help validate, mediate, & justify HDI spending to ensure the digital infrastructure meets app workload demand.

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    Migration, Backup, & Disaster Recovery. Ensure data replication to support app workload migration, business continuity goals, and data protection.

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    Identity, Security, & Compliance. Provide compliance visibility into application workloads and digital platforms to identify requirements and security baselines.

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    Packaging & Delivery. Administer the DPC tool itself and its ability to work with other HDIM tooling.

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    Value Improvement Visibility. Define digital platform improvement objectives (business impact), measure performance gaps, provide oversight of improvement efforts, and validate benefits delivered.

Key benefits of a DPC platform

Cohesive View

A DPC receives data and communicates across all HDIM tools, creating a coherent view (single version of the truth) of your entire infrastructure across all lifecycle stages.

Workload Flows

A DPC provides the ability to automate and orchestrate workloads in the form of workflows when and where they are needed, reducing the risks and costs involved with continuous upgrades.

Business Value

Finally, a DPC provides strategic Workplace leaders with a way to clearly identify and showcase the return on investment of current infrastructure and guide future initiatives.

Why Conductor?

The “conductor” aspect of (DPC) tools is key, as they address three gaps in traditional infrastructure management toolsets:​

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    Like an orchestra conductor gets all musicians to play in harmony, a DPC tool visualizes digital platform performance so stakeholders can have a coherent view of all the devices, apps, and infrastructure across all lifecycle stages.​

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    Like an electric conductor, a DPC tool improves the flow of application workload execution by coordinating where app workloads are placed on the digital platform now and in the future to best meet business needs across all environments — on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.​

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    Like a train conductor, a DPC tool helps ensure that stakeholder improvement initiatives embark and disembark successfully, that everyone follows business rules, and that the collective efforts demonstrate tangible business value across all technology architectures.

DigitalWorkplace

 

The Digital Platform Conductor market is just emerging.

It is clear that there is an immediate need for a tool that enables I&O leaders to manage their IT estates strategically, regardless of environment or location. Various vendors from different markets, including Cloud Infrastructure & Service Providers, Experience Management, Performance Analysis Tools, Data Center Technologies and Managed Service Providers, and Delivery Automation, have discovered and are trying to fill this void by adding capabilities to manage infrastructure outside of their current wheelhouse.

 

“The wide range of tools needed for a Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management (HDIM) toolset is prompting many vendors to add in cross-functional capabilities for managing the overall digital platform, resulting in duplicate functionality across multiple products.”

– Gartner, Innovation Insight For Digital Platform Conductor Tools

 

The analyst firm Gartner calls this evolving technology market segment the “Digital Platform Conductor." For many vendors, the goal is to become the platform that "rules all others" which is impossible considering the "breadth and depth required to play this role for all infrastructure now and in the future." While I&O leaders understand there won't be a magical tool that solves all problems, they need a tool that picks them up where they are right now (maturity- and technology-wise) but is flexible to adjust to their growing and changing demands as they become more mature.

 

In addition to Juriba, there are a few companies that are currently positioning themselves as DPC providers: 

  • Stonebranch Universal Automation Center (UAC), a real-time IT automation platform (SOAP) designed to centrally manage and orchestrate tasks and processes across hybrid IT environments — from on-prem to the cloud.
  • Cloudsoft AMP, a platform-based solution with state-of-the-art automation and everything-as-code capabilities with a focus on private clouds, public clouds, on-premises environments, and container platforms.
  • Readyworks aggregates and normalizes critical program data, analyzes risk, automates and orchestrates workflows, and provides real-time status to accelerate IT Transformation programs.
  • Flexera One, a SaaS-based IT management solution that helps you visualize your entire estate from on-premises to SaaS to the cloud.
  • Oomnitza, an agentless SaaS platform that provides versatile, low-code workflows and IT process automation templates.

Empower your teams today

Schedule a personalized live demo to experience the power of Juriba's Digital

Platform Conductor, the only DPC platform designed for the Workplace.