Gauging the Real Impact of Containers on the Channel
William Gibson once famously quipped that the future is already here; it just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet. Such is clearly the case with Docker containers. Survey after survey suggests that well more than half of IT organizations are now running Docker containers in a production environment. As a percentage of the overall application portfolio, the number of containerized applications remains small. But at their current rate of growth, containers may be the fastest emerging technology to be deployed in production environments in memory.
Driving that adoption is a wholesale shift to microservices architectures that make applications simpler to manage and secure. Instead of approaching applications in a monolithic fashion, organizations are organizing IT teams around specific functionalities. This approach not only makes it much easier to add new application functionality faster, but it fosters the deployment of applications that are much more secure, because security issues are addressed within a well-defined set of DevOps processes.
A lot of the activity and downstream opportunity containers create for the channel is largely invisible. Most containers today are deployed on top of existing virtual machines or on open source container-as-a-service (CaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. And yet, as container platforms continue to mature, it’s becoming apparent that everything—from the software stacks currently deployed on-premises to the way multi-cloud environments are manage—will be utterly transformed. Even legacy applications running in on-premises environments are now being lifted and shifted into the cloud using containers. At the same time, industry giants such as Cisco and Google are already maneuvering to gain an advantage in terms of hosting containers on-premises and in the cloud.
Although change of this magnitude is felt, however, it isn’t always well-understood until long after the fact. To gauge the scope of the impact container technologies are having on channel partners, we’d like to invite solution providers, integrators and managed service providers (MSPs) to participate in a short survey. We’ll be happy to share the results of that survey to help the channel as whole gain more insight into the forces driving what promises to be the next seismic wave of change across the IT landscape.
It doesn’t matter how much experience a channel partner has with containers today. What matters going forward is that the ability of the channel to thrive and prosper in the future starts with some old-fashioned sharing of market insights.