How IBM Cloud Product Insights fuels transformation

The New York Yankees didn’t build a baseball empire overnight.
I remind myself of that constantly as I prepare my team of 7-to-8 year-old aspiring major leaguers to battle for baseball royalty in the smallish hamlet of Wendell, N.C.
Some kids arrived at our inaugural practice with sound fundamentals and an unexpected mastery of baseball lingo. Others, ten practices in, still struggle with differentiating left field from right.
As such, it’s been necessary to teach the game in layers and not overwhelm the attention-challenged youngsters, many of whom would just as soon build sand forts in the infield as fielding a firmly-struck ground ball.
Clearly, I have trouble relating.
When I think about digital transformation, there are some undeniable parallels. Like building a winning baseball club, transformation also doesn’t occur overnight. And there are clear steps to be taken for a successful shift.
The first step towards digital transformation begins with understanding your existing IT environment. You need to know how well you are utilizing the middleware and infrastructure that supports your critical applications. For years, companies have invested heavily in these mostly on-premises assets, but IT staffs often lack visibility into how well they are being leveraged.
How can you plan for the future if you don’t have a good baseline for the present?
To aid with this challenge, we recently released IBM Cloud Product Insights. A new software as a service (SaaS) offering available on IBM Bluemix, IBM Cloud Product Insights provides IT staff with visibility into IBM enterprise software usage as well as cross-product inventory tracking—all from a single dashboard.
This solves a significant challenge for IT administrators and capacity planners at large companies. After years of investing in and deploying enterprise software, administrators are still using spreadsheets as the mechanism to track software instances and version levels. It can be even more difficult to keep pace with nimble, born on digital competitors when you’re stuck in a spreadsheet.
The reason: without fully understanding what you have within your environment and how well existing investments are being utilized, it’s difficult to make astute decisions on future investment on innovative cloud capabilities.
IBM Cloud Product Insights more than fills this gap. Not only does it provide visibility into your connected software instances, versions, and insights into usage, it also provides intelligent recommendations on available cloud services.  This is step two in your journey towards digital transformation.
Recommendations are tailored to your connected environment and are intended to provide insight into what is available to optimize your existing IT investments. In other words, IBM Cloud Product Insights recommends new opportunities to make what you already have running even better, helping you squeeze the most value out of your hybrid environment.
To put it another way: we recognize that our clients’ journeys into digital transformation aren’t a sudden lift-and-shift into the public cloud. The fastest path to better business outcomes is to embrace existing investments and add new cloud capabilities on top, fueling innovation.
Simply stated, we embrace hybrid cloud around here.
Today, IBM Cloud Product Insights supports most IBM middleware products, including IBM WebSphere, IBM MQ, IBM Integration Bus and IBM Operational Decision Manager. Support for additional IBM products will be added soon.
IBM Product Insights is available to you at no cost and is available from IBM Bluemix. Get connected and accelerate your team’s home-run digital transformation journey today.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud