DevOps on-premises opportunities spur CloudBees-Lenovo pact

CloudBees and Lenovo have joined forces to simplify adoption for DevOps on premises and address enterprises' DevOps deployments in their data centers.

CloudBees' global partnership with IT hardware vendor Lenovo spotlights the opportunities for DevOps in on-premises computing. The two will integrate the CloudBees Core continuous delivery suite on Lenovo's DevOps with OpenShift Solution and other DevOps platforms. Lenovo will also gain expanded Jenkins open source automation server capabilities from CloudBees.

In 2018, 80% of IT investments will go to on-premises computing, but a 30% increase in spending for cloud versus flat investments on premises will create an even 50-50 split by 2023, said Alan Waite, analyst at Gartner. By 2020, about 6% of organizations plan to run computing on premises only, 4% completely in the cloud and 90% in both.

"It's clear that the vast majority of businesses are going to run a hybrid computing environment, so server-side investments won't disappear," he said.

The vast majority of businesses are going to run a hybrid computing environment, so server-side investments won't disappear.

That balance translates to enterprises' investments for DevOps on premises, as well. Forty-one percent of businesses have adopted DevOps, and about 40% plan to invest in DevOps initiatives this year, said Gartner analyst George Spafford. DevOps on-premises deployments accounted for one-third of the global market in 2016, and it continued to steadily expand at an 18% rate in 2017, according to Grand View Research.

"The server space is a big market that CloudBees hasn't tapped into directly," said Jason Mero, vice president of business development and technical alliances at CloudBees, based in San Jose, Calif. "While some vendors are banking only on the cloud, we want to bring DevOps to the many businesses that put their trust in their own data centers."

Enterprise management tends to invest in IT in a deliberate way, and a majority still wants to run IT in-house to retain a high level of command and control, said Keith Pleas, DevOps architecture senior manager for Dublin-based consulting firm Accenture, which has used CloudBees' Jenkins Platform in customers' DevOps projects. However, they also recognize the innovations in cloud computing and want those capabilities in their data centers, as well.

Rather than build a lot of cloud applications for its customers, Lenovo has partnered with cloud independent software vendors. Prior to this CloudBees deal, Lenovo partnered with Cloudistics, a cloud virtualization platform provider, and software-defined storage vendor Nutanix.

CloudBees Core's strength in CI/CD and governance capabilities will help Lenovo customers automate governance and security of workloads and workflow, said Steve Brown, director of worldwide DevOps practice at Lenovo, based in Morrisville, N.C. "Our partnership with CloudBees will help businesses gain the flexibility and innovation of cloud DevOps methodologies in their on-premises compute environment," he said.