In the digital economy, the race to deliver superior customer experience has disrupted entire industries, some even overnight. From transportation, to healthcare, to retail, the power to reshape economies is just a few clicks away on our smartphones or tablets. Contending with markets and customer expectations that are changing at a rate that dramatically outpaces their delivery systems has become the new normal for business. This disruption is driving enterprise IT to fundamentally transform itself from being an operations arm to becoming the innovation engine.
Through 2017, 25% of big data implementations will fail to deliver business value as a result of performance problems due to inadequate network infrastructure.[1] What many of these organizations probably have in common is a mix of dependence on traditional infrastructure with a cost-center mentality to IT; a “bolt-on” approach to moving to a modernized, software-defined network infrastructure that serves as a transitional fix; and a lack of talent that is versed in modern data center technologies.
IT now needs to think, organize and prioritize radically different. A siloed approach to storage, network, and virtualization, apps, etc., just will not work.
An entire generation of enterprise apps that deliver these disruptive business services has also arrived and they are designed to evolve rapidly with daily or weekly releases, scale up and down on-demand and leverage data to help companies make rapid business decisions. This dynamic nature puts tremendous pressure on IT to provide a flexible, secure and massively scalable infrastructure. Thus, IT needs to design and architect a data center that is both agnostic of infrastructure and platform and can deliver on-demand business services on premise, via SaaS or by a hybrid cloud.
With next generation converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that are responsive to dynamic workloads, IT will have standardized infrastructure building blocks that are operationally efficient, offer a full range of deployment models and have powerful management and orchestration software built in, making them scalable, flexible, and fully automated.
By moving from a siloed view to a systems view, IT can now quickly, simply and cheaply reallocate resources to focus on driving business innovation. Companies deploying converged infrastructure solutions are already seeing results like 96% less downtime, 71% more efficient data center management, 4.4x faster time to market and ultimately 4.6x more applications deployed a year.
CIOs are dealing with an unprecedented amount of complexity in technology choices, security threats and business demands. To meet these needs they are focusing their IT organizations on driving business competitiveness and superior end user experience. They are increasingly looking for simplified infrastructure solutions that protect and run their mission-critical apps, providing flexibility to meet new demands by delivering the right tools for the right apps that ultimately accelerate the pace of innovation — all while dramatically reducing operating costs.
As we go forward, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure will continue to deliver all the tools needed to support an application developer in a flexibly configured system – from platforms to environments such as SAP HANA, virtual desktops, big data stacks, and Cloud Foundry PaaS.
IT stands at the threshold of even more exciting transformational technologies be it self-driving cars, sensing technologies or even virtual reality experiences. Working closely with our customers and partners, EMC and VCE are committed to delivering the most critical, game-changing, next generation infrastructure solutions that will help make these transformations a reality.
[1] Gartner. Predicts 2014: Big Data (2013, November 20). Full report: https://www.gartner.com/doc/2626815.
