Enabling the Application Era

The IT world has never moved this fast.

Trends appear seemingly overnight, then disappear just as quickly. A new, lucrative opportunity to monetize a product or service – and drive real differentiation – may only be available for a week before it’s adopted by everyone else. And disruptive upstarts continue to flood the market, upending established business models and tilting the competitive playing field away from traditional players.

The pace with which change happens today makes it clear that many companies will need to rethink their current IT structures. To help these environments reflect where the industry is headed next, we’ve developed a rich set of products and services designed from the bottom up with the future in mind.

To that end, we’ve taken many steps over the last few years to evolve the ClearPath Forward™ program in a manner that prepares it to serve as an integral component of tomorrow’s IT world: the tightly integrated, hybrid cloud environment.

Answering Change with Innovation

This journey to the hybrid cloud is rooted in a strategy we introduced in 2006 to move future ClearPath Forward systems away from proprietary architectures and toward an industry-standard, all Intel® foundation.

This shift, which reached its apex with the release of the most powerful ClearPath Forward Libra and Dorado systems we’ve ever built, resulted in a set of systems that delivered increasingly high, predictable levels of performance, resiliency, and scalability. Since 2015, all ClearPath Forward systems are Intel® based.

It also helped us be less reliant on unique hardware than we were in decades past, enabling our systems to function as self-contained, software-defined compute environments. Doing so paved the way for the ClearPath® Software Series.

The Software Series shows us taking a decidedly software-centric approach to IT. We’re increasing the flexibility with which clients can develop applications, enrich their skills, and support entry-level production workloads.

Plus, by making our core operating environments independent from the hardware to which they were historically tied, we’re helping clients deploy ClearPath MCP and OS 2200 software in more ways, and in more places, than they ever could. This way, they can freely support their unique business and market needs in the most optimal manner possible.

More importantly, they have greater freedom to focus on their applications.

The Future is Here

This turn towards application centricity represents the next logical step in our gradual transition to the hybrid cloud. It’s a way to protect clients’ long-standing investments while simultaneously equipping them to create and release innovative new capabilities.

Prioritizing applications to this degree effectively redefines the concept of “the data center.” It’s no longer the single, massive facility it once was. Rather, it’s now a mixture of on-premise systems and public and private cloud infrastructures, all deployed in a manner that optimally serves the organization’s unique application requirements.

Moreover, today’s application-focused mindset proves companies want to be in the business of their businesses, not the business of IT.

With the new direction the ClearPath Forward program has taken – and the advances and innovations that come with it – we’re making Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®) a key enabler of the application era.

Just consider ClearPath MCP Developer Studio. A ClearPath Software Series deliverable compatible with AB Suite, Developer Studio enables teams and individual developers to work simultaneously within a single system. This greatly increases flexibility and efficiency, while shortening the time required to push new capabilities into production. Plus, Developer Studio can now run on an industry-standard x86 infrastructure, Microsoft® Windows Server®, or even a VMware® ESXi™ hypervisor.

Likewise, with ClearPath MCP Bronze and Silver, two entry-level Software Series products that support an AB Suite workload, clients can deploy an entire, integrated operating environment on an x86 platform, as well as an ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V® hypervisor.

And the newly released ClearPath Visual IDE provides a Microsoft Visual Studio® plug-in that lets developers create projects, edit ClearPath MCP source files, and build solutions using the familiar Visual Studio interface they already employ for development in AB Suite and other languages.

Offerings like these illustrate how AB Suite extends and benefits from the way we’ve reshaped the ClearPath Forward program over the last two years.

It’s no longer as reliant on hardware as it used to be. It’s being outfitted to reside on the industry’s most popular virtualization layer. And it’s enriched by capabilities that improve the speed with which companies develop and deliver innovative new applications.

It’s about getting ready for the hybrid cloud. It’s about being ready for today and building for the future.

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