These are frustrating times for companies shopping for information technology services. They ogle new products making startup founders millions and billions of dollars. Then they find that their environments, applications and organizations don’t fit in or around them. How do they nail the best value and performance when sticker prices and ratings may not hold?

“You can’t look at technology in a vacuum,” said Nick Brackney (pictured, right), senior consultant of cloud product marketing at Dell EMC.

If a technology is isolated — say, the most advanced new analytics software — some might say it’s the best data-analysis tech available today. But factor in an individual organization, its people, processes and budget, and it may be a less-than-perfect fit. “I think you have to meet them where they are. I read an article, and someone said for analytics most CEOs still are using Excel. … That’s what they’re most comfortable with,” Brackney said. 

Brackney and Bob Ganley (pictured, left), senior consultant of cloud product marketing at Dell EMC, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed the complexity of aligning organizations and their legacy with new technologies. (* Disclosure below.)

Lost in translation; found in hybrid consistency

Consistency across on-premises environments and public clouds remains largely out of reach. Advanced new software might work great for refactored cloud apps but not so much for on-prem legacy apps. When teams, tools and processes traverse environments, procedures like security checks are as much fun as they are at airports.

“If you’ve got multiple different tools to use, it’s just harder to do,” Ganley stated. “Security … begins with who are you, what do you have access to? If you have different ways of doing that on-prem than in cloud, you are, by definition, [in] a riskier state.” 

Price in one environment versus another is not often simply higher or lower. It depends primarily on the application, according to Ganley. Public-cloud agility is often touted as an advantage over paying upfront for hardware.

“There are certain workloads that break cloud economics,” he said. Massive storage demands or steady state can run up the cloud bill, he added.  

Hybridized cloud-on-prem offerings might enable a more consistent experience across environments, Ganley pointed out. Added to the entire multicloud landscape, they complete a fuller array of choices for diverse workloads. Dell-EMC-owned VMware Inc. partners with the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc. to blend cloud and virtualization technologies for multicloud portability. VMware Cloud on Amazon’s Outposts hybrid solution is expected to arrive in 2020. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE