We talked to Kyndryl’s Chief Information Officer, Michael Bradshaw, about how Kyndryl’s approach to enterprise technology will help bring greater stability and efficiency to complex IT estates.
If you could boil it down to a one-sentence elevator pitch, what is the ultimate aim of Kyndryl Bridge?
Kyndryl Bridge enables you to see trouble coming and gives you the intelligence to take action before a technical problem becomes a business problem.
How does it make life easier for CIOs?
If you’re the CIO of an enterprise today, your job is two-fold. On one hand, CIOs have the tough responsibility of overseeing their enterprises’ really large and complex IT estates. On the flip side, they are also responsible for making sure their technology works toward achieving ambitious, long-term business goals. If the myriad components of a vast IT estate aren’t harmonized, business growth will slow down.
Kyndryl Bridge doesn’t require tech leaders to throw out the technologies in which they’ve already invested. That’s important to know. It's designed so that the vast majority of tools enterprises already use can be plugged into it. It’s a plug-and-play proposition, versus introducing a brand-new proprietary technology and forcing tech leaders to use just our tools.
It puts a new level of power into the hands of technology leaders by providing them a better form of integrated observability over their tech infrastructures, using tools they know and trust, and also access to automation and AI-powered insights and recommendations to predict and prevent challenges, and improve business outcomes.
Kyndryl Bridge puts a new level of power into the hands of technology leaders.
So a key element is the power to more proactively manage a complex IT environment?
Exactly. A big problem today is that, by the time a CIO learns of an IT issue, it’s usually too late. The business is already losing revenue and customer satisfaction is dropping.
The platform makes life easier for CIOs and their technology teams by surfacing performance and availability issues before they manifest as business problems. Think about how cars have evolved over the years. In older models, when you ran out of oil or anti-freeze, a dashboard light would alert you, by which time maybe you’d already started experiencing some engine problems. In newer models on the road today, the vehicle is outfitted with technology that tells the driver, “Hey, in 1,000 miles you’ll want more oil.” They are designed now to stop problems well before they have a chance to manifest. The platform offers the same sort of tool for CIOs.
This is about raising the quality of service. The more insight that I have, the more I’m able to take preventive actions and the less impact there is on the business. As a result, the enterprise has better stability, and with stability come more opportunities to look for creative ways to focus on innovation and help the business grow.
What does Kyndryl Bridge do to enable visibility and deliver insight?
The short answer is that we’re making it easier to streamline much of the work that IT departments have been doing by hand for decades. Some of this involves deploying advanced automation tools to help our experts as they deliver clear, real-time information about our customers’ IT estates to enterprise technology leaders. Everything moves so fast today, businesses need an edge like this just to keep up.
We’re making it easier to streamline much of the work that IT departments have been doing by hand for decades.
In a complex, heterogeneous tech environment, system performance data exists, but it is most often spread out and in siloes. Kyndryl Bridge connects, aggregates, and centralizes all that siloed performance and health data. Then, it analyzes the results in real time to provide operations personnel the intelligence they need to keep systems running at peak performance. Think again about my earlier car analogy, it would be like getting advance notice of an engine incident before it happens, giving you the power to prevent it from ever happening at all.
So it helps solve problems before they start?
Exactly. I’ll use another analogy, which is that for way too long, managed infrastructure services companies have operated as tow trucks of the global economy. We’re the phone call you make when problems big and small arise.
Those days are over. Kyndryl is reimagining how tech infrastructure management is approached in an ever-evolving, increasingly complex global economy. One of the ways we’re doing that is by enabling our customers to have a new level of visibility and data insight into everything at once. That allows their operations personnel to better understand the nature of an issue or impending issue. It also gives them a head start in developing solutions.
As Kyndryl continues to add more capabilities to Kyndryl Bridge, how do you see it evolving?
Ultimately, Kyndryl’s extensive catalog of intellectual property will be woven throughout Kyndryl Bridge, enabling it to deploy ready-made, industrial scale solutions from Kyndryl and from across our broad suite of alliance partners. That means our customers are going to be able to pick and choose the tools they need from across a rich ecosystem of choices, and from leading companies such as Microsoft, Google, VMWare, and SAP, among many others.
It is being designed to be a strategic hub, an integration platform that connects Kyndryl’s deep bench of industry expertise with forward-thinking innovation and cutting-edge tools. This is what enterprises across the globe are going to be looking for as they seek to scale their ambitions and achieve their business goals.
