Taking ClearPath Forward Beyond “the Box”

Recounting the history of the ClearPath Forward™ program means telling a story about change.

It’s a story that sees massive, rapid, unprecedented changes happening in the business and IT worlds. It’s a story about how we’ve anticipated, responded to, and embraced these changes by making changes of our own – reinventing, updating, enhancing, and reimaging the characteristics that define ClearPath Forward systems in order to keep them aligned with the technology trends and business imperatives impacting our client base.

And, as you’ll see, it’s a story that continues.

Becoming “Everything Centric”

In many ways, this story of change begins in earnest with a strategy we launched in 2006 to standardize future ClearPath Forward systems on an all Intel® chipset.

This hardware-centric transition moved our systems away from their existing, proprietary architectures and toward an industry-standard foundation, giving clients a set of systems that provided increasing levels of performance, along with the characteristics they had come to expect from the ClearPath Forward environment.

We delivered on this promise time and again over several years, ultimately releasing the most powerful ClearPath Forward Libra and Dorado systems we’ve ever built.

In addition to laying the groundwork that would culminate in these milestone releases, this strategy enabled us to be less tied to the hardware than we were in decades past. The boundaries became undefined, affording us the freedom to shape our systems in a manner that allowed them to function as self-contained, software-defined compute environments – and become much better equipped to play central roles in the modern, tightly integrated data center.

Transitioning from a hardware-centric to a software-centric mindset represented a massive change in the direction and definition of the ClearPath Forward program. It’s a shift we embodied in the ClearPath® Software Series.

The Software Series is a decidedly software-centric approach to IT. It moves our premium operating environments – as well as their underlying capabilities – above the hardware to which they used to be tied, making it possible for clients to deploy ClearPath MCP and OS 2200 software in more ways, and in more places, than they ever could.

In doing so, they have more time, energy, and resources to focus on what matters most: the applications that define the value their businesses bring to market.

And by supporting this new application-centric shift, we’re sharpening the ClearPath Forward program’s emphasis on driving business value.

A Focus on Business Value

The application – and, more specifically, the application layer – is the new differentiator. Companies recognize the immense value these assets hold and are building infrastructures with the express purpose of ensuring their business-critical applications remain current, available, and optimized for use on a variety of channels and devices.

Prioritizing applications in this way means the data center will soon look nothing like it once did. Rather than a single, monolithic facility, the “data center” is now a blend of traditional, on-premise systems and public and private cloud infrastructures, all of which are utilized in whichever combination and location best suits the application layer’s unique requirements.

It also illustrates another important truth: Companies simply aren’t as focused on the data center as they once were. They’d rather be in the business of their businesses, of making sure their applications serve as the best possible representations of their brand identities. And they want to do so while exploiting the characteristics of, and new flexible ownership choices for, the new hybrid data centers of the future.

The Next Wave of Change

Our recent launch is evidence of the ways we’ve responded to, as well as embraced, this intense focus on business value.

To that end, it marks the start of the ClearPath Forward technology’s transition from hardware-centric offerings to software-only solutions deployable on a wide array of platforms.

Starting with the entry-level ClearPath MCP Bronze and Silver offerings, clients have the freedom to deploy an entire, integrated operating environment on the hardware of their choice. The MCP environment can reside on an x86 platform that conforms to specific reference architecture guidelines. Or, it can even be deployed on a VMware® ESXi™ or Microsoft® Hyper-V® hypervisor.

Creating MCP software that’s free to live on different hardware, across different environments, illustrates the ClearPath Forward program’s new, application-centric direction.

It’s a logical extension of the last decade-plus of work. It shows that the strategies we put into place along the way have positioned us to take advantage of where things are today. And, most importantly, it proves that when something is well planned from the start, it fits and continues to fit.

It’s a story that continues.