As more companies look to transform digitally, the path to get there can be complex.

Seeking to help organizations simplify their digital transformation journeys is Capgemini SE. The organization created its Digital Cloud Platform, built on Red Hat OpenShift, to enable companies to rapidly develop their digital capabilities, according to Clemens Reijnen (pictured), global chief technology officer of cloud services and DevOps leader at Sogeti (part of the Capgemini Group) and vice president at Capgemini SE.

“We can deploy OpenShift container solutions everywhere and then start to modernize those small [on-prem application] components,” Reijnen said. “And when we are starting to [modernize], we can do that really at lightspeed. And from there, you start to actually untangle the hairball of your whole application landscape and start to move those components.”

Reijnen spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed digital transformation, challenges, scaling and the cloud migration path. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

When you start defining digital organizations and digital transformations, what are the kinds of things that you’re talking about with organizations in terms of the kind of migration path?

Reijnen: I’m always starting the discussion with their business capabilities. An organization wants to create business capabilities either to interact and engage with their workforce and to make them work in the most efficient way. And what they are using for that are all kinds of different digital channels. And those digital channels can be a mobile app. We are also using chatbots for IT devices.

Organizations want to engage and grow on the customer side and have a nice interaction there. And again, they are using those digital channels to interact with those customers and bring them the engagement interaction they really want to have. But they are also starting to leverage, and that’s where the transformation and migration start with their on-prem systems, their legacy systems to move those kinds of capabilities and enrich that with cloud native capabilities to all kinds of enterprise solutions, like the ones from IBM for example, to expose that to their digital channels, to their organizations.

There are always challenges in terms of deployments and decisions. So what are you hearing again from the customer side about their pain points? 

Reijnen: You have that whole digital landscape that comes with some interesting challenges. How do I implement this landscape in the right scalable way? How do I expose my data in such a way that it is secure? How do I leverage all the capabilities from the platforms I’m using? And how do I make all these moving parts consistent, compliant with the regulations I need to work towards? But [there are] also the technical challenges. How do I adopt those kinds of technologies? How do I make it scalable? How do I make it really an integrated solution on its own? 

You just talked about building for the future, building for a more expansive footprint with all kinds of capabilities that frankly we’re not even aware of right now. So how do you plan for that kind of flexibility, that kind of agility when it’s a bit unpredictable? 

Reijnen: Well, we normally start with “you need to have a clear foundation.” And a foundation when, for example, you are using the cloud for it, you want to have that foundation in such a way that those digital channels can connect really easily to it. And then the product and feature teams are creating those kinds of [business] capabilities on top of that cloud foundation. And in that foundation, you want to put everything in place. 

You want to make it very easy for [those teams] to do the right thing. That’s what you want to put in your cloud foundation. And that’s where you are harnessing your security. Every application that’s learning from the foundation is secure. You are [also] embracing a standard way of working. And again, the easy way should be the right way to provide them with templates and technologies so that they can really focus very quickly on those kinds of business capabilities. So the cloud foundation is the base that needs to be in place. 

So Red Hat is involved in this. You’ve got IBM involved as well, obviously your partnership working with them. Talk about that kind of merger of resources … and in terms of what the value proposition is to your clients at the end of the day to have that kind of firepower working on their behalf. 

Reijnen: IBM is for us a very important partner, definitely on the hybrid multicloud scenarios where we can leverage OpenShift on those kinds of platforms for our customers. And we created templates, scripts. We use the IBM Garage projects for it to create deployments for our teams in a kind of self-servicing way to deploy those OpenShift clusters on top of the cloud platform of their choice. 

And then for sure, with the Multicloud Manager from IBM, we can manage that actually in the landing zone and that’s actually the whole idea. And you want to give the flexibility and the speeds to your DevOps teams to be able to do the right thing and then manage it from your cloud foundation so that they are comfortable that when they’re putting the workloads in that whole multi-hybrid cloud platform that it is managed, organized all in the right way. And that’s definitely where IBM Red Hat OpenShift comes into play.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE