Hybrid Platforms Trends Series - The Platform Of The Future - Vision, Mission, Belief

Over the past 12 months, I have talked about a few key concepts from our Hybrid Platforms category, things like avoiding the hype cycles and our Right Workload | Right Platform mantra along with some thoughts on Cyber Resilience. 

As we move into the middle of 2025, I will delve into the details of the messaging and capability we have built. Still, before we get into the details, I believe it’s key to share the overall message that binds it all together; something we call 'The Platform of the Future" is what sets out our Vision, Belief and Mission and guides everything else. In the first two parts of this series, I will detail the messaging behind 'The Platform of the Future' and outline the three core focus areas for 2025. In the following six parts, I will delve into the details of each focus area, covering Hybrid Cloud, Secure Networking and Data Protection.  

Hybrid Platforms  

This is a quick reminder that our Hybrid Platforms pillar covers all the technology areas where you store data and run applications and how you connect and protect them. The following ten categories summarise the specific areas we focus on in Hybrid Platforms.  

Everything I discuss in my Hybrid Platforms Trends series relates to these categories and is relevant to anyone responsible for decision-making or solution architecture. 

The Vision 

The first thing we need to remember is that ‘The Platform of the Future’ is not intended to be a thing you can buy, so there won’t be an SKU for this any time soon! It is designed to provide a framework of capabilities that can be used as a north star for organisations building strategies for hosting applications, extracting value from data and increasing overall maturity over the coming years.  

The vision statement for Platform of the Future (below) sets out the core outcomes we seek to drive both technically and organisationally. Extracting value from Data is the key driver and enables decision-makers to be more informed, ultimately helping to drive an exceptional customer experience.  

"For all organisations to be running on sustainable, cyber resilient and performant platforms that support all application requirements. Enabling data to be leveraged as a foundation for decision making, driving change and delivering exceptional customer experiences." 

To enable this vision, we defined five key principles that IT leaders and architects should consider when making decisions and designing systems.  

• OMNI Workload Capable: Ensure that the platform choices we make support all workloads, not just the shiny new ones. Not all workloads are equal, and these differing demands require differing approaches to how we build, host, and secure each.  

• Is Hyper-Connected: Building a secure and programable network that enables a performant connected services ecosystem will provide the backbone for a digital future. Without a performant network, we cannot leverage data to its full potential or tackle rising cyber challenges. 

• Be Cyber Resilient: Cyber threats are evolving and escalating. To tackle the challenge, we must simultaneously deploy our defence-in-depth solutions and core operational challenges. Only then will we be able to withstand and recover from attacks? 

• Empowers Simple Operations: Skills are either in short supply or increasing in cost, threatening the timeline of critical transformation projects and impacting profitability. The days of manual administration should be long gone, and every decision we make will have automation in mind.  
• Underpins Sustainable Outcomes: Sustainable outcomes involve two core concepts. The first concerns the future of our planet and how we can help reduce carbon consumption. The second concerns how we can drive optimal utilisation and adopt just-in-time provisioning to reduce costs and support commercial sustainability. The good news is that, in most cases, we can do both simultaneously. 

These five themes feed into a broader Platform of the Future architecture framework (see the next post) designed to provide a foundation for an organisation's future digital readiness. This framework connects the vision to reality and is supported by our core beliefs and mission statements. 

Our Belief  

The vision is formulated around our belief statement (below) that the future will be ‘as a service’ (XaaS) based. Ask, "Would you build a Windows server if you started a business today?" (or container/Linux virtual machine, etc.); for many organisations, their core function is not running infrastructure, so the answer is no. If starting a business today, we would likely find a few SaaS applications, an Identity provider, and some devices and get on with delivering outcomes to our prospective consumers.  

"We believe the future is XaaS, and the challenge is how to navigate the complex journey from traditional IT and application architectures to the platform of the future." 

Ignoring the specific dates, we can see below an application journey that many organisations have been navigating for the past few decades; the longer your organisation has existed, the more complex this landscape will look. This challenge now faces many organisations: how do you unpick all that history and set a journey to a future? For some, they are nearly there; for others, it’s an unobtainable dream, but for many, there is a route to reduced reliance on old architectures. 

For transparency, we understand that many organisations rely on customised applications, and a fully XaaS future is impractical. We expect most to agree that more XaaS would be preferable if technically and commercially feasible.  

The Mission 

This belief drives the mission statement for our Hybrid Platforms teams (below), which centres around helping our customers architect, deploy, and operate their version of The Platform of the Future.  

"To enable our customers to architect, deploy and operate the data and application platforms of the future, ensuring these are hyper-connected, performant and secure. Whilst enabling the ability to leverage the true value of data, which can be used to drive differentiation and customer satisfaction."  

The simple version of this is we "Take complex 'stuff' and make it simple, so you can deliver outcomes" Navigating the Hybrid Platforms Landscape can be complicated, and we should not ignore this fact. From building next-generation data centres, cloud platforms, secure networking solutions, modern applications, and AI outcomes, the depth and breadth of knowledge required can be daunting. Ensuring we have teams of people with expert knowledge and real-world experience on all the possible outcomes is our mission, allowing you to augment internal teams when required.  

Avoid the Hype: 

At CDW, we are lucky to work with most of the market's vendors and, as such, are not tied to any one outcome. This independence allows us to take a unique stance in the market and provide advice and guidance that is not burdened by the biases of products, market trends, or strategic alliances.  

Unfortunately, our sector can be driven by constant technology hype cycles, contributing to increased complexity and risk. From bare metal to virtualisation, cloud, and now hybrid, we are consistently promised the next wave will solve all problems. Rarely do we fully realise the value of the previous wave before we embark on the next. Our Independent stance allows us to avoid being caught in their cycles and provide better customer advice. 

This constant cycle stretches the technical landscape within organisations and, consequently, accelerates technical debt. This acceleration has knock-on impacts of increasing talent challenges (more technology to support) and exaggerating cyber risks (large attack surface). The ultimate outcome of this is an impact on service quality, something that no organisation can sustain for long. 

Conclusion 

By applying our independent stance in the market, we are on a mission to help organisations architect, deploy and operate the data and application platforms of the future. The goal is to enable data to be leveraged as a foundation for decision-making, driving change and delivering exceptional customer experiences. We want to challenge the trends (hype cycles) that have plagued our industry for decades and drive towards simpler architectures that can help reduce costs, increase revenue potential and delight your consumers.  

Join me in part two as we examine how we make all this a reality and examine some of the concepts and details that lie behind our Vision, Mission, and Belief for Hybrid Platforms. We will discuss our Right Workload | Right Platform mantra, evolving operating models, and six-layer conceptual architecture.