Guest-blog: Neil Cattermull – Digital Transformation and ‘Open source on steroids’

Neil Cattermull


The two words ‘Digital Transformation’ seem to be words that we hear and see everyday across internal discussions at main executive board and c-suite. But exactly why are these discussions important, and why should they be a priority?

Firstly, what is Digital Transformation and why is it so important?




Let’s start from the beginning. Heraclitus once said:
“The only thing that is constant is change,” – and this is very true and relevant today.

With major moves forward in technology and accessibility toward digital media in the past 10 years, people now view technology in a completely different way and also learn in a different way.
This has been a huge factor in creating a need for companies to evolve and stay relevant, transforming the way they run their business, and also train their staff.

With the general concentration span of millennials being much shorter than that of their predecessors, businesses must change the way they interact with millennial employees and customers.

If we look at this from an internal perspective too, we see everything from employee training to onboarding and productivity can be improved through digital transformation in the correct way.
It is important to remember though that digital transformation will generate some push back and resistance. This is very normal, and this is also why it is important to implement it in the right way.

Effectively, Digital Transformation is an ongoing effort to rewire all operations for the ever-evolving digital world, by adopting the latest technologies in order to improve processes, strategies, and the bottom line.

Digital transformation became a term, decades ago, and at that time largely meant digitising. But today, a company needs to leverage digital tools to be more competitive, not just more digital.

Going forward, companies will need to harness machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of things (IoT) to be pre-emptive in their business strategies, rather than reactive or presumptive.

And after that? We can only speculate. Technology is advancing at a faster pace than we can adapt to it. What is clear is that digital maturity is a moving target, which makes digital transformation ongoing.

Today I have the pleasure of introducing another Guest Blogger, Neil Cattermull – Neil is a Public Speaker and Commercial Director living in London, United Kingdom and a public figure in writing about technology, and entrepreneurship. He is considered a global Industry influencer and authority within the tech-scene.

Neil has travelled around the world assisting small to large firms with business models. Ranked as a global business influencer and technical analyst. He has held directorship positions within technology divisions within the financial services market, such as Merrill Lynch, WestLB, Thomson Financial and he has created many small to midsize organisations.

Neil is going to discuss ‘Open Source on Steroids’.

The words “digital transformation” are on the lips of every person in technology and tech media, as well as many business leaders – from company CIOs and CTOs to technology to business line managers to writers in news publications and tech blogs.

At its core, a digital transformation is the enablement of technologies and workplaces tuned to today’s digital economy. The beating heart of this digital economy is the API, and is being followed now by emerging technologies like IoT (Internet of things) and FinTech technologies like Blockchain.

Today the transformation of processes, IT services, database schemas and storage are proceeding at exponential rates with Cloud, AI and Big Data currently taking center stage as new ways of working in the enterprise.

The glue to the majority of developments in the technology world is the adoption, proliferation and acceptance of Open Source technologies. Community developments such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, MongoDB, Ubuntu and the Hyperledger project are some of the names that freely fall from any Open Source discussion.

The question is where do you run these workloads? How do you run these workloads? And in what form should these workloads take?

Most major companies will have mainframe systems at the core of their IT systems, so the question is really whether to run new workloads there, or on other platforms?

Any building architect will tell you that before tearing down the walls of an old house or doing any significant structural changes, you should always consult the original architectural plans. In the same way, any systems architect would look very closely at what a mainframe system is doing now before considering running workloads elsewhere.

However, it is imperative to understand the difference between mainframe and midrange server technology at a very high-level:

• Mainframe systems are designed to scale vertically not horizontally
• Input / Output is designed in mainframe systems to move processing away from the core and very fast I/O is built in to the core of a mainframe system, even at the hardware layer
• Centralized architecture is a key feature allowing mainframe systems to manage huge workloads extremley efficiently – catering for 100% utilisation without any degradation of perfromance
• Resilience is built in to every key component of a mainframe; redundancy at the core
• At a transactional level there is no other system that comes anywhere near the level of processing of data that a mainframe system can process.

An argument against the mainframe could be to decouple software systems onto commodity hardware or cloud systems; but this tends to create server and cost sprawl, particularly if an important goal is to mirror the mainframe’s performance, security, transaction throughput capacity, reliability, maintainability and flexibility.

But as we move further into the world of IoT, with databases and Big Data systems acquiring vast amounts of ingested social media and transactional data, how are we scoping the growth and security of these systems?
We are not if we simply just keep adding to existing IT infrastructures – we need to be able to scale access and throughput to manage, interigate and optimse the hottest commodity we have: data!

Data is becoming a currency in its own right but we need to secure this new currency in a way we do today with traditional moentary systems.
And perhaps the best way to leverage this valuable asset is via APIs that allow enterprises to take advantage of the mainframe investments already made – enter a LinuxOne Open Source ready mainframe that assists with creating a familiar Open Source tooling stack on steroids!

The argument here is that a digital transformation is more than just empty words and data thrown on cloud servers, it is a state of mind, and an architecture that should encompass current and future systems towards overall business goals.

At the heart of this goal is the end-user consumer, something that every system architect should be very mindful of; however, downtime and security are quite often understated when creating the initial framework for key infratsucture projects.

These key elements must be baked into every project and at the very core of future technology initiatives – something that the Open Source Ready LinuxOne infrastructure delivers extremely well.

You can contact Neil Cattermull:
– LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/neilcattermull
– Twitter: @NeilCattermull
– email: Neil.Cattermull@gmail.com