Forget the hype surrounding cloud strategy. Howard Boville, Senior Vice President of IBM Cloud, reminded enterprises that cloud is a tool to help implement their actual business strategy.

Enterprises should not embrace cloud computing thinking that the end goal is simply to be in the cloud. Instead, they must realize that their success in achieving their business strategy and reaping long-term benefits depends on having a strong architecture. One that recognizes that cloud is a tool that should adjust to the needs of the enterprise, and not the other way around.

Improving business processes

“The approach that we have within IBM is one of a hybrid multi-cloud. We believe that you will be taking cloud consumption from a public perspective, but also you will build out your own private clouds. And you will also continue to have your applications run on more traditional resource pools.

“That allows you to have that flexibility both from an on-prem and off-prem perspective, but also the need to have a multi-cloud offering means that you are able to take services from more than one provider. And your selection of those providers wouldn’t just be economic. It would be based upon the security and controls they’ve built into their clouds so you can have peace of mind that your applications and data are running in a safe manner,” Boville said in his keynote on Day 2 of the inaugural IBM Cloud Forum 2020.

The two-day IBM Cloud Forum 2020 kicked off yesterday. IBM Asia Pacific is holding this regional event to bring together Asia Pacific’s C-level executives and technical leaders, experts, and innovators.

Boville pointed out that the strategy of enterprises is to become more agile and productive. The stakes have become even higher because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted businesses and accelerated digital transformation.

He emphasized that cloud is a tool that improves the productivity of critical business processes. The components of these business processes include people, applications, data, and digital supply chains.

Startup speed

“The approach that we take is a methodology which we call a virtual garage. That’s where we bring a team of specialists across multi-disciplines that come together to address the problems that I’ve talked about all the way through the cycle. So what areas of productivity do you need to be driving harder than what you currently can because of the atrophy or entropy that gets into your business processes? And how do you derive value from that?”

He said the IBM Garage methodology has been tried and tested through the years. By freeing up these processes, this virtual garage works with enterprises to help them drive more value and work more like startups.

Startup speed for enterprises? Boville ended his keynote by showing a quote from a Fortune 500 CEO: “IBM Garage did in five weeks what another vendor couldn’t do in five years.”