With the progress of digital transformation overtaking enterprise computing and business processes, streamlined information technology operations management, or ITOM, is the next hurdle organizations must overcome to fully leverage the benefits of cloud computing’s virtualization methods.

“It’s going to evolve; the question is how it’s going to evolve. … The underlying infrastructure is changing so much. We are moving from virtual machines to serverless architectures, to containers. … The IT operations management itself should evolve to something new,” said Muddu Sudhakar (pictured), chief executive officer and investor at Stealth Mode Startup Co.

Sudhakar spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how businesses can leverage a cloud-operating model into the enterprise and which among those competing for market dominance today will be the first to define the cloud experience.

Learning to build for the virtual space

In the decades since it was developed to establish guidelines for mainframes and client servers, ITOM has grown to encompass cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual systems that necessitate more complex management standards. While this new tech complicates the work of administration, it also holds the key to simplifying it at scale.

“IT operations management is built around a human being. … Your trading is algorithmic, you’re in a self-driving car age, but at the IT operations management is around an IT admin and a DevOps. That’s got to change,” Sudhakar said.

Eighty to 90 percent of future compute will be automated, Sudhakar forecasted, and the key to this simplified processing lies in the flexibility of plastic infrastructure. “The plastic infrastructure will be able to run workloads, it should be malleable. … That’s where serverless really comes in,” he said.

The fundamental changes within IT operations creates an opportunity for new market leadership among cloud support businesses. While top cloud contenders like Amazon, Azure and Google have the right infrastructure foundation, new startups may sooner meet the challenges of workload management and AI operations and find new ways to address other niche needs throughout the market, Sudhakar predicted.

“Most vendors are … still tied to the old infrastructure … physical servers. Nobody is building this thing for the cloud. So somebody who has the right substrate to build this … will end up winning this game,” he said.

Looking ahead, Sudhakar urges businesses in the ITOM space to focus on leveraging data toward process innovation and not being afraid to try and fail. “Make bets. Don’t be afraid of making bets, unless you make a bet you’re never going to win,” he concluded.

Watch the entire video interview with Muddu Sudhakar below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE