The transition to cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way companies view their information technology organizations. No longer are IT departments tasked with merely maintaining the status quo in some obscure part of the office; IT leadership now takes a seat at the roundtable in shaping the future of a business. “The Wall Street Journal” even has a page dedicated to the latest chief information officer news.

Now more than ever, companies are looking to streamline their application deployments, according to Anand Krishnan, executive vice president and general manager at Canonical Ltd. Canonical is responsible for the Ubuntu operating system, which has become ubiquitous in most development environments. 

“The vision is that you want somebody to take components off a catalog and stitch them together in a way that makes sense for that user and then deploy them to one of many target environments,” Krishnan explained.

During an interview with Krishnan at OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest-host John Troyer (@jtroyer), of theCUBE is SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, listened to insights into the next trends in IT management. (*Disclosure below.)

The defining problem in IT for the coming decade

A strong segment of Canonical’s enterprise customers is getting slowed down by an IT department decoupled from business units. They are also looking at new ways of deploying applications.

Krishnan recalled a request from a customer: “It’s got to be on-premise; honestly, I don’t care if it’s OpenStack. I just want it to be done as a service and done quickly … I want IT as a Service.” 

McKinsey & Co. also shared this sentiment in a recent survey showing an increasing number of companies looking to consume infrastructure rather than build it.

“The heart of that is where we think IT has to go from being run by people to being run by software, being run by a model that is designed by people … not building infrastructure, but letting people deploy applications on top of it,” Krishnan explained. 

Ubuntu’s position as the default application environment gives it the unique ability to deliver on these promises. As Troyer put it: “Think of Ubuntu as not an operating system anymore, but as a set of platforms and services that can give you a consistent application environment.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston. (* Disclosure: Canonical Group Ltd. sponsored this OpenStack Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Canonical Group nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE