This article summarizes findings from a Bain & Company report titled “For Traditional Enterprises, The Path To Digital And The Role Of Containers,” originally reported by InformationWeek (January 2017). The report was sponsored by Red Hat and authored by Bain partners Jeff Taylor (Boston), Paul Renno (San Francisco), and manager Jesse Klein (Boston), all members of Bain’s Technology Practice. The survey covered 449 U.S. business executives and IT managers.
Containers Are Moving from Experimental to Essential
Containers have long been discussed as an optional or experimental technology—a tool for greenfield microservices projects or developer convenience. A 2017 Bain & Company study challenges that framing directly. For traditional enterprises trying to compete in an increasingly digital marketplace, the report argues, container adoption is not optional; it is a foundational step in the transition to a modern, agile IT operating model.
The key insight is that containers are not only useful for building new cloud-native applications. They are also a viable path for modernizing legacy monolithic systems that enterprises cannot easily replace.
Why Containers Matter for Legacy Enterprises
Traditional companies face a specific challenge: they must ship software faster and more reliably while maintaining the stability their operations depend on. Containers help solve this problem because they package an application together with its dependencies in discrete software layers. A single layer can be updated independently without disrupting the others—making incremental updates safer and faster.
The Docker container format, which the report references repeatedly, allows an application to be built once and moved across environments. A host system running the appropriate Linux version can recognize and run the container without additional configuration. This portability reduces environment-related failures and accelerates the handoff between development, testing, and production.
The report notes that Windows Server 2016—released in late 2016—added support for Windows containers based on the Docker format, broadening container adoption into the traditionally VM-dominated Windows data center ecosystem.
Key Findings from the Bain Study
The following findings are drawn directly from the Bain & Company report based on survey data from 449 U.S. executives and IT managers:
- Digital maturity drives revenue growth. Companies in the top 15% of digitization progress were eight times more likely to have grown revenues faster than their industry average compared to those in the bottom 15%.
- Containers reduce development time by 15–30%. The packaging and portability of containers eliminate a significant portion of environment setup, integration, and handoff friction in the development lifecycle.
- Containers benefit the full application lifecycle. Beyond development, containers ease handoffs from dev to test to production and simplify ongoing application updates.
- Early adopters report 5–15% operational savings. Containers consume fewer compute resources than virtual machines—less memory, less overhead per process—translating to measurable infrastructure efficiency gains.
- Containers work for stateful as well as stateless applications. While containers were initially best suited to stateless, web-facing workloads, the report highlights growing success with stateful applications. Dell is cited as having successfully containerized a 20-year-old, monolithic systems management tool.
- Container use cases are shifting. At the time of the report, web applications were the dominant container workload. The study projected that within three years, the priority would shift to containerizing custom database applications, business intelligence tools, and reporting dashboards.
- Containers will coexist with VMs, not replace them—at least in the near term. The preferred deployment pattern at the time was running containers inside virtual machines, combining the isolation benefits of VMs with the agility of containers. Bare-metal container deployments were less common.
The Chicken-and-Egg Problem: Business Transformation vs. IT Modernization
One of the more nuanced points in the report is the question of sequencing. Should an enterprise modernize its IT infrastructure first and then use that foundation to pursue digital business opportunities? Or should business leaders define the digital strategy and then demand IT capabilities to match?
The Bain authors suggest the answer is neither—the two must proceed concurrently. Companies succeeding in the digital transition prioritize changes to their operating model (decision rights, talent, collaboration) alongside investment in core IT architecture. Business needs define the immediate technology priorities, and IT must be ready to execute rapidly once those priorities are set.
For IT leaders, this means investing proactively in technology that delivers four properties: adaptability, resilience, speed, and analytics capability. Containers, the report argues, directly support all four.
Sponsor Context and Platform Considerations
Red Hat sponsored the Bain report, reflecting its investment in container-based platforms. At the time, Red Hat’s primary container offerings included OpenShift (its container application platform) and Atomic Host (a minimal RHEL variant optimized for running containers). Readers should weigh the sponsorship context when evaluating the report’s framing, though the survey methodology and core data points were independently gathered by Bain.
The report’s conclusions are not exclusive to Red Hat’s stack. The authors note they apply equally to other container ecosystems, including Docker’s own platform, the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS, and container host operating systems such as Ubuntu and CoreOS.
The Bottom Line for DevOps and IT Leaders
In 2017, the Bain study represented one of the first major consulting-firm endorsements of containers as a strategic enterprise technology rather than a developer convenience. The core argument remains relevant: organizations that treat containers as optional are likely to find themselves slower and more expensive to operate than competitors who have embraced container-based workflows across the software delivery lifecycle.
For DevOps teams, the practical takeaways are straightforward:
- Containers are not only for greenfield microservices—legacy application containerization is feasible and delivers real returns.
- The development-to-production handoff is a major source of efficiency gain, not just the runtime itself.
- VM and container coexistence is a valid and common architecture; organizations do not need to choose one or the other immediately.
- Stateful workloads are an increasingly viable container use case, though they require more careful orchestration planning.
As container orchestration platforms have matured significantly since 2017—with Kubernetes becoming the de facto standard—the case for enterprise container adoption has only grown stronger since this study was published.