10 years ago, many different and independent surveys and studies predicted that by 2020, 100% of IT services and applications would be in the cloud. IT executives believed that, by now, data centers would all go away. After the initial cloud-euphoria passed, the bills for public cloud summed up, security concerns became real and the realization that not every app is suitable for cloud kicked-in, the smarter hybrid IT with hybrid-cloud was established. Today’s survey show that 72% of companies say their cloud strategy is hybrid-first or private first, and 65% of companies use between 4 and 5 different cloud providers.

Hybrid cloud environments give enterprises the best of both worlds: Flexibility, unlimited resources and power of public clouds; as well as more customized, business-tuned, and safer resources and services from the private cloud. However, business and DevOps teams have an insatiable demand for rapid service provisioning. When IT is too slow to respond, they adopt cloud and third-party services without involving IT. And the internal IT teams are always being compared to external service user experience and speeds.

Introducing HCMX

Micro Focus has recently released the new solution, Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX), with which you can automate service fulfillment across a broad set of new and traditional, public and private, cloud-based platforms. With this single solution, you also enforce service governance and simplify user consumption experience. You can create an easy-to-use service catalog with complete fulfillment orchestration and strong governance and cost control in place.

HCMX is the evolution of the HCM product. Likewise HCM, HCMX is an enterprise-ready solution for multi-cloud management, so you can aggregate, design, deploy, manage and govern cloud and infrastructure services. What sets HCMX apart is the flexible automation of the dynamic fulfillment of a wide range of environments from a streamlined catalog, using two levels of abstraction: adaptive service designs and a master orchestrator. You need much less staff to design and manage services, because you will have fewer designs. Services can include any mix of on-premise resources, private cloud, public cloud, software or containers. You are also armed with policy-based cost governance, analytics and show-back reporting to keep cloud spending visible and on target.

The big improvement in HCMX is the easiness of service consumption. HCMX shares the service portal and catalog with SMAX. In Enterprise service management (ESM), IT, HR, corporate and “other” services have much in common, they are threaded together in a value stream starting with the customer and delivered by the employees. Therefore, it’s only natural that you offer your users—from IT or non-IT teams—a unified user experience. You need to give them the possibility to access a single service catalog, from which to order and provision the service they need.

And this is not all. By “turn-key” SMAX license activation, HCMX can be easily extended with ITSM, ESM, and ITAM. You can run HCMX in the public cloud, including AWS/EKS, Azure/AKS or GCP/GKE or in a traditional data center. HCMX is entirely codeless configured and you will be able to easily upgrade it whenever you want.

A short overview of what you get with HCMX

Orchestrated fulfillment

You first need to design and then automate your hybrid environment. You can design services where options are selectable at the time of deployment, allowing for flexible automation. A single design automates the fulfillment of a large variety of service requests, via ad-hoc selection of parameters and service options. This saves you time and effort and keeps your catalog lean.

The cloud admins can select and aggregate the right public cloud service with options. The Master Orchestrator in HCMX (aka OO) works above scripts and other management tools to provide on-demand execution of each requested environment with choices—speeding delivery, minimizing manual effort and improving quality.

With extensive, out-of-the-box orchestration capabilities, you can cover the complete service life cycle, including “day 1” provisioning requests and “day 2” maintenance and change requests. This allows your IT to minimize manual work and reduce costs, as you get a large library of out-of-the box workflows.

When you customize service offerings, you can change fields, forms, business rules, processes, notifications, and custom actions.

Enforced governance

Public cloud spending can easily get out of control.  Central IT often has to answer for unplanned bills.  HCMX offers authoritative, rule-based approval flows to enforce compliance and cost control across the entire organization. These dynamic, governance rules include a task plan and can trigger a variety of automated workflows based on user input. HCMX also automatically applies multi-level approval rules based on specific choices the end user made.

You have access to dashboards and detailed, centralized cost reports for Azure and AWS and you can identify the biggest spenders via powerful data slicing and dicing capabilities. You can further optimize public cloud costs via built-in insights around reserved instances, and benefit from cost-effective, reservation-based pricing and avoid overspending on on-demand instances.

Simplified consumption

When end users have a hard time finding what they need to get their jobs done, innovation and productivity suffer. Running multiple application configurations on multiple OS flavors on multiple platforms can quickly become a management nightmare. Your HCMX users can request cloud and hybrid services in the uniform way as any other service. They can get help and guidance with IDOL-based smart search and AI-based virtual agent in finding services with right options faster, 24x7. The well-structured catalog does the heavy lifting in easy requesting, provisioning and consuming of services. Users can request and provision services also via native mobile apps. You can expect that your user community satisfaction will increase and your IT cost decrease. When both HCMX and SMAX are used, users access a single portal and catalog, and have uniform, engaging experience. This is how you deliver a unified ticketing and incident management, and even full service management capabilities.

Additionally, with HCMX you get:

·        A common data model housed in a configuration management database (CMDB) which serves as a single source of truth for change management and root cause analysis. You will avoid having to replicate or synchronize data between cloud management and IT service management silos.

·        Entirely codeless configuration accelerates onboarding and reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) through smoother upgrades giving you instant access to new features and capabilities.

·        Multi-tenancy with a single multi-tenant console which helps MSPs with high scalability, and deployment flexibility across cloud and on-premise environments

·        Extensive and well-documented RESTful APIs which help you support integration between HCMX and DevOps tools for on-demand creation of development or production environments.

Hybrid clouds have become complex but you can still get the value you are paying for. When you use HCMX, you unify the provisioning, provide complete production-ready environment faster, better govern cloud spending and even make private cloud a much more effective alternative for your enterprise. You only need a single IT team to fulfill a wide variety of infrastructure and cloud resources and so power key business services.

Do not miss the HCMX webinar

If you haven’t already, please register for our next webinar, “How to Build an Effective Hybrid Cloud Management Platform,” which will be held on September 03 at 8AM PT (5PM CET), to hear our HCMX experts discuss the new release in more detail.

Have technical questions about HCMX? Visit the HCMX Discussion Forum

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Do you have an Idea or Product Enhancement Request about Operations Bridge? Submit it in the HCMX Idea Exchange

~Vesna