New IT capabilities for an emerging market

Or doing complex processes correctly the first time, no rework necessary.

These are the kinds of capabilities that GBM, a managed services provider in Central America, wants to bring to the region by helping businesses take a hybrid cloud approach to IT.

The market for managed services is growing rapidly in Central America. Alex Mathews, GBM’s Manager of Architecture, sees the demand firsthand in conversations with customers. “Many of them are seeing the unnecessary costs, as well as the capability limitations, of managing their own systems at their own locations,” says Mathews. “They need more fit with less fat.”

GBM selected IBM Cloud Pak® for Multicloud Management software, including the Red Hat® OpenShift® container platform, to create and manage bespoke hybrid cloud infrastructures for each of its unique clients. Using the IBM Cloud Pak solution, GBM can move workloads between a customer’s on-premises systems, GBM’s data center, and any private or public cloud platform—while managing it as one seamless infrastructure.

“We can deliver a complete, very complex environment with a single provisioning process,” says Mathews. “Before, we had to do many things in the network, in the storage, in the server farms to provision a single application that has three or four different VMs. The Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management gives us, in a single package, a way to standardize and automate provisioning of VMs across platforms. With just one setup, we can provision and orchestrate many different environments. That reduces our operational expenses in this area by half.”

According to a service-level agreement (SLA) in GBM’s contract with customers, when a customer requests a new virtual machine (VM), GBM has one week to provision it to meet the customer’s requirements. Today, using the IBM Cloud Pak software, says Mathews, “we do it in two minutes online.” And it’s not that the one-week SLA was too generous. “Before, it made sense because of the complexity of the environment,” explains Mathews.

Alleviating complexity has also helped boost quality. Before, approximately 30% of VM fulfillment time, on average, was spent on rework. Now, the need for rework is almost completely eliminated.

Of course, such leaps forward in capabilities generate corresponding leaps in expectations. “Now, customers want to renegotiate the contract with more challenging SLAs,” laughs Mathews.

GBM also drives efficiency by using the IBM Cloud Pak solution to standardize and automate maintenance from a single control pane, even if a customer’s environment spans multiple clouds. “Today the multicloud is a very complex environment,” says Mathews. “And with the Cloud Pak we have the opportunity to see the multicloud in a flat way.”

For example, by using the Red Hat Cloud Forms and Red Hat OpenShift components of the IBM Cloud Pak software, GBM gains clear visibility over containerized VMs across different systems and platforms. VMs can automatically be shifted between systems as needed, meaning hardware outages have little to no effect on service. For customers, this means maximized uptime for their applications.

This ability to abstract applications from the underlying systems is inspiring Mathews and his GBM teammates to think differently about their work. “We’re doing our jobs in a different way. We have brought the focus of our services up a level, to the customer’s actual business services.” This shift in thinking illustrates the power of hybrid cloud: it allows a company to focus more on developing the business capabilities it needs and less on the underlying IT.