Red Dot honors IBM with 2021 Best of the Best Award.

I’m excited to share that IBM Cloud Satellite™ won a Red Dot: Best of the Best Award in the Brand and Communication Design: Interface and User Experience Design category. I’m so proud of our design, engineering and product management teams working on IBM Cloud Satellite for their passion and dedication to delivering quality work. I’m thrilled that this award has recognized these efforts.

What is Red Dot?

The Red Dot Award is one of the most competitive design awards in the design industry — in 2021, over 20,000 entries from all over the world competed for the awards. Being selected by their jury — a panel of 23 design experts with international recognition — is a huge accomplishment. I am very proud of our product design teams for the hard work, the thinking and the high standards of execution they put into creating these exceptional experiences.

This exciting award recognizes the best brands and creative works of the year across multiple different industries. Congratulations to the winning team!

What is IBM Cloud Satellite?

IBM Cloud Satellite lets enterprises use IBM Cloud® services on-premises, at the edge or on other public clouds. Through deep user research, the product team learned that customers had pressing concerns: “How can we innovate faster? How can we move to the cloud and stay secure?”

IBM Cloud Satellite turned the concept of the cloud upside down. Instead of customers worrying — “How do I move to the cloud?” — IBM Cloud Satellite brings the cloud to them. With IBM Cloud Satellite, users can run the latest IBM Cloud services in artificial intelligence, machine learning or databases — wherever their servers are while staying secure and compliant.

Mapping the customer journey

During the beta launch, the design team used IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT) framework to map out the customer journey and realized that it could take users up to a month — and over 90 steps — to get up and running with IBM Cloud Satellite. 

The team realized they needed to simplify the location setup while still preserving the flexibility to hook up a customer’s infrastructure of choice.

So, they brainstormed solutions with engineers and product managers and introduced the concept of templates powered by the Infrastructure-as-Code offering, IBM Cloud Schematics.

To build consistent product experiences at scale, IBM Cloud Satellite leverages the Carbon Design System. With the introduction of templates, the Satellite team also worked with a cross-platform team to create a reusable pattern.

Now, an infrastructure admin can try out IBM Cloud Satellite by visiting the location create page, picking the Amazon Web Services (for example) template option, providing their credentials and having IBM set up all the needed infrastructure, including networking on their behalf. This reduced the time it took teams to get started from a month to as little as 15 minutes. 

The team mapped out the process to create a location that reduced necessary steps from 90 to 7.

With their first Satellite location ready to go, the infrastructure administrator would choose from one of the Satellite-enabled services in the IBM Cloud Catalog — like Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud — and click Create to have a managed OpenShift cluster running on Amazon EC2s within minutes. 

IBM Cloud Satellite also offers a guided tour for those registering an on-premises location for the first time and learning tiles to introduce key Satellite concepts.

Learn more

If you would like to learn more about IBM Cloud Satellite, you can visit our website.