IBM Cloud Satellite lets IT teams deploy and manage their workloads across any environment including on-premises, multi-cloud, and the edge. I was the design lead on Satellite helping take it from an idea to launch.

The idea of Satellite came about shortly after IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat (2018), which included Red Hat’s flagship offering, the OpenShift Container Platform. We noticed IT teams struggling to self manage OpenShift on-prem. This was largely due to the fact that they could’t use OpenShift on the public cloud due to regulation, security or latency requirements. But still, as they say, “friends don’t let friends manage OpenShift.” What if we could enable seamless management of OpenShift across any environment?

Our design team helped take the idea of Satellite from concept car to Tech Preview. We ramped up on the current state of distributed cloud offerings on the market, which were all in the early preview stage. We put a storyboard together to get early feedback from potential users culminating in Satellite's Tech Preview debut at IBM's Think 2020 conference.

We quickly realized that offering managed OpenShift on-prem was only the beginning. There was a much broader need for managed cloud services in any environment. Our design team worked on clickable prototypes and user testing, which formed the foundation of Satellite’s Closed Beta.

During Satellite’s Beta, I conducted a UX audit of the experience of setting up Cloud Pak for Data on AWS via Satellite, revealing 96 steps and sometimes up to a month to get started. I collaborated with a group of designers from across IBM Cloud on a template pattern that would enable us to enable a one-click create for Satellite and other services across the IBM Cloud platform. Using the new template pattern led to a reduction in time to set up a Satellite location from one month to 15 minutes, 96 steps down to 7. This easy install was later cited as one of the main wow factors when Satellite won it’s Red Dot: Best of the Best award.

Satellite officially launched in early 2021 and is now a key enabler of IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy.