Is Digital transformation real? Answer is a resounding yes! And it is taking the businesses by storm. Every business is turning or trying to become a digitally driven business. Most businesses have understood the importance of re-aligning their processes and technologies. Most CXOs are acutely aware of the fact that they must act and drive the imperatives of improving intelligence, agility and customer-centricity, or they would be left behind.
But the path toward digitally aligned businesses has many challenges: technical, process, and even cultural. One of the biggest challenges of digital transformation is acting on the insights generated by data collected across sources. Simply put, how to turn insights into action?
Merriam-Webster defines insight as ‘the power or act of seeing into a situation’. This is precisely one of the key purposes of digital transformation – data analytics is used to uncover actionable insights, generate predictive forecasts and act on recommendations.
So, when businesses embark upon digital transformation, the key task is to identify a meaningful usage. For example: If you’re trying to improve overall operational efficiency, you need to look at exactly which operations and which levers the mangers can pull to affect a real change.
Secondly, we need to decode information (or analytics) provided by IT systems. Most of the present day systems are designed to give ‘here’s what I have to say’ perspective rather than ‘here’s what you need to know’ perspective. For example, a fitness tracker that tells me “I’ve walked 2,000 steps today” this is called “what I have to say” standpoint. However, a fitness tracker that knows I usually walk 4,000 steps in a day, also knows that I have set a goal of 5,000 steps and that 3pm is my break time, it should be able to suggest that I could use my break to walk some extra steps and achieve my goal. This is called as “what I need to know” perspective. Which means businesses must design the system that would prompt meaningful actions based on these insights. This can be summed up in three steps:  Intelligence > Insights > Actions.
This sentiment of transformation across industries has picked the momentum and enterprises are working on actionable plans.
As a part of the action plan, companies will increasingly need to be able to engage with broader ecosystems with a range of businesses and technologies as well as position themselves to take advantage of data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things. That requires IT systems that can process massive amounts of data, continuously deliver new infrastructure environments in minutes, etc. while maintaining core legacy IT systems. Cloud, Containers, Microservices and DevOps in addition to a few others are the vehicles of this transformation.
Containers and Microservices have picked up significantly which supports the digital transformation initiatives. Typically, most of the architectures and solutions are built on open source technologies and serve as an interface layer between the underlying runtime and the software being built and deployed on top of it. Docker/Containers have emerged as a key new technology to help package and deploy applications both within a single container and across an orchestrated cluster. Microservices are typically either built on a PaaS or from scratch on container orchestration and management tooling, both of which typically run atop IaaS or private cloud. All the top tools at the containers and microservices layer are open source, emphasizing the vital role it plays in enabling software-defined infrastructure transformation. The rationale comes back to two of the overarching benefits of DevOps: increasing agility and lowering the risk and its impact. Just like how data is the heart of digital transformation – DevOps, Mircoservices and Container technologies will play a big game changer for enterprises seeking digital transformation.
Sandeep Khuperkar I Director and CTO, Ashnik

Sandeep is the Director and CTO at Ashnik. He brings more than 21 years of Industry experience (most of it spans across Red Hat & IBM India), with 14+ years in open source and building open source and Linux business model. He is on Advisory Board of JJM College of Engineering (Electronics Dept.)  And visiting lecturer with few of Engineering colleges and works towards enabling them on open source technologies. He is author, Enthusiast and community moderator at Opensource.com. He is also member of Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation and Open Source Consortium Of India.