Torsten Volk, Research Director, Server Virtualization, Cloud & IT Automation, Enterprise Mangement Associates (EMA), discussed system management trends and the changing role of the CIO in the enterprise with theCUBE co-hosts David Vellante and John Furrier, live at VMWorld 2013.

EMA researches all the aspects of enterprise management, including  network management, systems management, and service level management. Research Director Torsten Volk reiterated the same idea other guests had pointed out during VMWorld, “it’s all about the application. It’s all about how do we help the business units and developers best manage their systems.”

Analyzing the traditional look at network storage and compute and how it is being managed, Volk explained that system management professionals now get “requirements from the business unit” around things like Big Data applications, DevOps, etc, and they should be able to react to these requests.

Asked about the state of the orchestration market, Volk said, “the research tells me that the business units don’t care what’s going on in the data center.” IT operations is getting a shot of the arm, and developers are becoming much more of change agents, people who deliver to business. “IT operations for the first time is starting to listen to business units, to developers.”

The DevOps mentality is moving into the traditional enterprise. This is just a part of the cultural shift in the enterprise. The CIO role is also changing and they are becoming server brokers, their rethinking their roles in terms of being aware, understanding they have to compete with external service.

Commenting on ServiceMesh’s strengths, Volk said “they are the people that focus on governance the strongest.” He also added VMware is in need of a similar solution for their virtualization stack.

John Furrier asked how the systems management space could be covered when systems themselves were being re-architected. Volk explained the solution is to “start with the customer,” and find what their pain is, as they have specific problems that they are looking to solve.