Over three thousand infrastructure & operations practitioners gathered in Las Vegas in December to hear from analysts- and network with each other – at the infrastructure world’s premier technology-agnostic exchange of best practices. As not everyone could attend, we took notes.

The Value of Gartner’s Market Reach

Gartner’s market reach is remarkable.

GTSG is recognized in Gartner research for its strategy, workload migration, disaster recovery, and mainframe expertise. Over one hundred GTSG consultants, architects, technical subject matter experts, and technical project managers “go deep” on mission-critical client engagements ranging from weeks to years- the nature of consulting and implementation work.

By contrast, each Gartner analyst has perhaps one thousand interactions annually with a broad range of organizations. Gartner then synthesizes these interactions, with best practices crystallized into research covering the full range of industry segments.

GTSG engages with dozens of these analysts each quarter. We benefit from their unparalleled market view and collective insight; our clients benefit from the knowledge that our methods are consistent with Gartner-recommended practices and solution paths.

Tracks and Emphasis

Over two hundred learning opportunities, including roundtables and vendor sessions, focused on innovation, cloud value, engineering platforms, operational enhancement, edge compute, security, skills, and leadership, with several on the future of the data center (summarized in this piece).

Keynote: Empowered People and Groundbreaking Innovations Deliver Your Future

Analysts Autumn Stanish, Dennis Smith, and Tom Bittman presented the keynote, which focused on generative AI, integrated platform engineering, and empowered people. Taken together, these themes are what Gartner is calling Generative Transformation.

Generative AI

“Transform- or be transformed.” Tom advises embracing a process Gartner calls “generative transformation” –building on what you’ve done and continuously adapting at the speed of business. For I&O leaders, this means overhauling anything that’s insufficiently flexible.

Gartner believes Gen AI is different.

• AI finds patterns. Gen AI builds new, creative content from those patterns.
• AI works in the language of tech; Gen AI brings the tech to humans

We’re at the peak of the hype cycle, and yes, Gen AI comes with risk…it can “break things.” But Tom believes the risk of inaction is more significant, as do 80% of Gartner’s CIO survey respondents, who plan full GenAI adoption within three years. (Even 75% of CEOs have tried ChatGPT.)

Yes, exploit day-to-day incremental improvement opportunities, but also consider how to tear down silos, finding the right balance of reward, risk, and cost. While finding this balance, Tom urges, “Don’t hold back, lean in.”

Think in terms of staff augmentation, not replacement. In fact, we should be thinking about hiring “Gen AI natives.”  Gartner believes that 90% of organizations will suffer more than ten revenue-impacting events due to insufficient GenAI skills and investments.

Distrust and verify. Non-confidential information only. Validate everything that comes from Gen AI and create guardrails. Half of CIOs are concerned about hallucinations and reasoning errors (“it only takes one”).

Infrastructure Platform Engineering

Dennis Smith expressed his concern that many of our business colleagues are “giving up” as I&O struggles to keep pace with new service requests, manage technical debt, and ensure alignment with business objectives.

Transform, Dennis urges us, to Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE): Gartner believes that by 2027, 70% of I&O leaders who fail to transform their teams to this delivery model will be managing only legacy infrastructure services.

Product management principles and software engineering practices characterize IPE, which benefits I&O’s internal customers with improved productivity and an improved developer experience. It helps us in I&O by reducing duplication of work and resources, improving agility, retention, and talent attraction, and optimizing operations.

Empowering People

Autumn Stanish focused on human capabilities, advocating the “generative mindset” and advising that we

• hire for characteristics
• amplify growth opportunities, and
• cultivate psychological safety.

The number one skill will be critical thinking/analysis. We should consider both hiring from unconventional sources and utilizing “capability descriptions” rather than job descriptions. She also noted that we’d over relied on outsourcing, resulting in a “…staggering 66%…struggling to address critical skill gaps in IT.”

Leaders need to be career accelerators, not gatekeepers as we build a culture of experimentation.

Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations

Six trends this year, presented by Jeffrey Hewitt and driven by geopolitical and technological macro-forces:

• “Machine customers” are eventually expected to control trillions of dollars, providing opportunities for I&O to drive revenue, efficiencies, and build customer relationships
• AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AITRiSM) includes approaches to “model interpretability and explainability, AI data protection, model operations, and adversarial attack resistance”
• The Augmented Connected Workforce: accelerating time to competency while simultaneously requiring new skills and workflow changes within I&O.
• Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM): combine “attackers’ and defenders’ views” to reduce exposure
• Democratized Generative AI: enabling the democratization of knowledge and skills through conversation and natural language. The “potential Rosetta Stone to translate English into the language of I&O.”
• Nationalism vs Globalism: with increased international conflict, countries look to reduce dependencies on foreign products, talent, and services. The focus moves beyond data sovereignty to security, network, cloud, and technical intellectual property.

Future of Cloud

Dennis Smith presented the future of the (approaching one trillion dollar) cloud market. He sees progression on a continuum from

• technology disruptor and capability enabler (where most organizations are today) to
• innovation facilitator, then business disruptor, to business necessity- where, they believe, most organizations will be in 2028.

Dennis called out seven trends of note. Gartner believes that “by 2028:”

• Multicloud: despite widespread adoption, Gartner is concerned that over half of enterprises won’t get value from their multi-cloud implementations
• Cloud-native platforms will become the foundation for the overwhelming majority of new digital initiatives, up from less than half right now, enabling organizations to transform application portfolios at the pace the market demands
• Modernization: the rewriting/porting of legacy applications to leverage cloud computing capabilities will drive 70% of workloads to the cloud environment, up from 25% today, with a heavy focus on mainframe and legacy midrange systems
• Industry Cloud Solutions: more than 50% of enterprises will take advantage of the modularity, composability and built-in industry-specific functionality of these combined SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings
• Digital Sovereignty Strategies will be adopted by more than 50% of enterprises (up from 10% today) as organizations attempt to protect against control by outside jurisdictions and from foreign government access.
• Sustainability: over half of enterprises will rank sustainability as a top five procurement criterion, doubling today’s percentage- driven by multiple stakeholders, requiring both providers and customers to take responsibility
• AI/ML workloads will consume 50% of cloud capacity, up from less than 10% today

Innovation and offering enhancements, the accelerating pace of digital transformation, and the focus on value will drive cloud adoption forward, somewhat mitigated by deglobalization, financial risk, reports of outages and security breaches, and talent shortages. Despite these mitigating factors, Dennis states, ‘there is no going back.’

Dennis advises bringing in functional leaders to adapt strategy as these trends will dictate. For example, SPVM should focus on governance across a diverse set of vendors; I&O should drive the shift to adaptive governance and infrastructure product ownership; security needs to embrace “policy as code,” EA should include the business in cloud strategy & architecture development, and applications leaders should embrace agile and composable techniques while encouraging joint business/IT development.

Infrastructure and Data Center Trends

Tony Harvey presented three interrelated sessions on the future of infrastructure, the future of the data center, and a session on ideas to reduce data center costs.

The Future of Infrastructure

“Infrastructure is interesting again” because of three interrelated trends: AI, sustainability, and technology shifts.

AI: The train, Tony says, is beginning to leave the station. Gartner believes that by 2028, 50% of enterprise platforms will leverage specialized infrastructures to support AI infusion, up from less than 10% today. Vendors are bringing in AIOPS and ML, and we will see more use of natural language queries of the infrastructure in preference to CLI.

AI has a massive impact on the design of the data center: it is, of course, very power-hungry and will to some extent be on-prem due to distance limitations. It will also dramatically impact the network: ‘every GPU talking to every other will cause the ethernet to fall over.’ AI will significantly impact how we architect, design, and build data center power and cooling, networking, servers, and storage.

GTSG’s partner BRUNS-PAK is designing and building HPC environments all across North America (and beyond) to accommodate this exploding demand.

Sustainability: Gartner predicts that, by 2028, more than 70% of enterprises will alter their data center strategy due to limited energy supply, up from less than 5% in 2023. Ireland already has a moratorium on new DC builds, as do a couple of Virginia counties, Tony tells us. We need to take steps ranging from metrics review and cleaning up zombie equipment to rightsizing power and cooling, and modularization. (To discuss further, let us know at Partners@GTSG.com and we’ll connect you with BRUNS-PAK.)

We also need to change our approach to managing end-of-life materials: only 18% is actually recycled. The new mindset needs to incorporate refurbishment, repair, and return.

Tech Shifts will change how we design, build, and run our infrastructure.

• CXL because bandwidth per core is declining, memory tied to the device, and GPUS are underutilized. CXL enables disaggregated memory – core memory capacity and bandwidth within a system – and shared memory capacity across systems.
• Composable infrastructure creates physical systems from shared pools of resources using an API and
• Liquid cooling: as large AI clusters can exceed 40kW per rack, liquid cooling will be required. And as your data center might not be suitable, colocation and cloud can help.

The future of the data center

Will the data center still exist? Data centers will be everywhere, and they’ll need to be automated, intelligent, sustainable, efficient, resilient, and secure.

Availability, security, and cost challenges are always with us. But the range of challenges has exploded, extending to everything from skills challenges and growing complexity to regulations and AI/ML to rising energy density to cloud operating models and hybrid integration.

Sovereignty will play an increasing role: we hear routinely about country-level data issues, yet, in Colorado, Tony tells us, gaming laws prohibit information about bets from leaving the state.

Trends: Tony summarized as

• AI and automation
• Distributed/”Everywhere”
• Sustainability and efficiency
• Global changes and innovation
• Resiliency and security

And from the Hype Cycle, Tony and his colleagues called out five emerging technologies/sets:

• Liquid cooling technologies
• New power technologies
• Datacenter AR technologies
• Third-generation DCIM
• Automation

Finally, two evergreen lessons from the cost focus:

• “Anyone” can cut cost, but balancing risk, cost, and value takes significant, thoughtful effort
• Cost cutting ought not to be an “event” but rather an ongoing organizational discipline

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We hope these notes have been of value to you. If you would like to talk further, please write to us at Partners@GTSG.com.