Red Hat, IBM Deliver Managed Process Mining Service on OpenShift
Red Hat, IBM and Celonis today announced general availability of a managed service based on the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) running on an instance of Red Hat OpenShift in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Lars Herrmann, vice president for partner ecosystem products and technologies at Red Hat, says the process mining software created by Celonis will become more accessible to a wider range of organizations when consumed as a managed service accessed via Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).
Based on Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift is becoming the foundation for a series of managed services that Red Hat and its parent company are delivering via multiple public clouds. In addition to AWS, for example, Red Hat and IBM intend to make Celonis EMS available as a managed service on other public clouds such as Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure, notes Herrmann.
The alliance between Red Hat, IBM and Celonis was formally announced earlier this year. Interest in process mining tools has risen sharply as organizations launched a variety of digital business transformation initiatives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many organizations discovered they simply did not have a deep understanding of how processes had evolved over time. Process mining tools provide insights into how a process currently works before an organization attempts to reengineer it.
The challenge many organizations face is that the need to mine processes is intermittent, so it often makes more sense to consume these tools as a service rather than dedicating IT resources to provisioning and maintaining them.
Red Hat and IBM, of course, are also using the alliance with Celonis to position Red Hat OpenShift as the ideal platform for reengineering processes using cloud-native applications that can be built and deployed on top of the same platform. Rather than relying on a managed Kubernetes service that runs only on a single cloud, Red Hat and IBM are making a case for a multi-cloud approach to consuming Kubernetes—and the applications that run on top of it—as a service.
It’s too early to assess the degree to which Kubernetes and the applications that run on top of it will be consumed as a service versus as a platform deployed and managed by an internal IT organization. Today, there is a general shortage of Kubernetes expertise so more organizations are inclined to rely on an external service provider to manage Kubernetes environments on their behalf. That approach then makes it possible to devote more resources to building and deploying the cloud-native applications that are driving most digital business transformation initiatives, says Herrmann.
Regardless of the approach, the one thing that many organizations are starting to realize is that digital business transformation is never-ending. Processes will be continuously refined and updated as each organization looks to IT to create some type of sustainable competitive advantage. The challenge now is determining to what degree the infrastructure required to drive those initiatives should be managed by internal IT staff or an external services provider.
