See how selling hyper-converged infrastructure can help to build your business while also supporting your customers’ growth.
In the first of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we look at how hyper-convergence effectively underpins successful IT Transformation.
Organizations that embrace IT Transformation are able to automate tasks, streamline processes and free up resources. They experience increased IT operational speed, efficiency, scale and cost-effectiveness. Why? Because they no longer have to reply on inflexible, legacy systems that result in siloed solutions and time-consuming manual management tasks.
How many of your customers would love to be able to report improved efficiency and productivity like that? Making improvements at the IT level enables companies of all sizes to embark on wider Digital Transformation – which will ensure that they’re able to stay competitive and thrive in today’s digital economy.
One of the fundamental steps an organization needs to take in embracing IT Transformation is to modernize its data center to feature converged or hyper-converged infrastructure (CI/HCI), All-Flash storage, software-defined networks and storage, virtualization, scale-out and modern data protection.
Support your customers with trusted HCI expertise
As the fastest path to a modern data center, implementing a converged or hyper-converged infrastructure is the optimal way to underpin successful IT Transformation. It’s simpler and quicker than other options, and it reduces expenditure too.
A converged infrastructure is a pre-tested, pre-configured, pre-integrated system composed of compute, storage and networking elements, which offers ongoing lifecycle management across the stack. A hyper-converged infrastructure is better still, going further to provide even more integration via software-defined capabilities and interfaces.
HCI is typically described as a pillar of the modern data center – and Dell EMC is the #1 leader in HCI6 as well as #1 in all HCI components (External enterprise storage3, All Flash4, Servers5, servers).
Significant benefits for your business
Association with such market-leading performance gives your business a great boost, because selling Dell EMC HCI positions you as a thought leader in cloud.
The size of this ever-growing market offers other big benefits for you too:
- Explosive HCI market growth – 60% of organizations have adopted HCI or are seriously considering it. While the market for HCI grew 68% YoY in 3Q17, IDC expects it to reach $8.7 billion by 2021.1
- Simpler and shorter sales cycle – See bigger sales and margins sooner with a solution that’s truly pre-engineered and pre-validated for rapid purchase and deployment.
Why hyper-convergence is the way forward
With its scale-out architecture and approach to combining components engineered to work together, HCI technology is explicitly intended to support simplicity, speed and cost-efficiency. It typically enables organizations to get up and running faster – and requires less ongoing management. All of which is great news for any company looking to modernize its data center.
There’s no doubt that hyper-convergence is the way forward. Earlier this year, ESG conducted a survey of 4,000 IT executives from private- and public-sector organizations across 16 countries to evaluate their progress in embracing IT Transformation2 – and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.
The study showed that nearly all (98%) of those companies with ‘Transformed’ status are using CI or HCI solutions – and 86% use both. In contrast, most ‘Legacy’ organizations surveyed (56%) have not yet deployed any type of CI/HCI.
In ‘Transformed’ organizations, not only is CI/HCI in use, but it has quickly become a vital component of the overall IT environment. In fact, on average, ‘Transformed’ organizations are currently running more than 35% of their applications on CI or HCI platforms.
HCI is a hallmark of a transformed organization
Further to these general observations, ESG found that companies that had deployed CI/HCI solutions are experiencing very tangible and significant benefits in terms of overall business performance.
The survey revealed that organizations that are using CI/HCI:
- Run more than 35% of their applications on CI/HCI.
- Saw a 25% reduction in infrastructure operating costs.
- Were 7.5X more likely to complete most app deployments ahead of schedule (when using both CI and HCI).
- Spent 31% less time on routine system management.
- Saw a 52% reduction in time spent on infrastructure deployment tasks (when more than 50% of workloads with CI).
Read and share the full ESG Research Insights Brief >>
Learn more about the role of CI/HCI in IT Transformation and start speaking to your prospects and customers about the proven businesses benefits.
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1 Based on IDC WW Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, Q3 2017, December 2017, 3Q Vendor Revenue.
2 ESG Research Insights Paper, ‘Research Proves IT Transformation’s Persistent Link to Agility, Innovation, and Business Value’, March 2018.
3 External Enterprise Storage : Ranking by vendor revenue. IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2017 Q4 historical release, March 1, 2018. Dell Inc represents the combined revenues for Dell and EMC.
4 Servers : Dell Inc. and HPE/New H3C Group were statistically tied in worldwide server revenue and worldwide x86 server revenue due to a difference of one percent or less in the share of revenue. IDC Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2018.
5 All Flash : Ranking by vendor revenue. IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2017 Q4 historical release, March 1, 2018. Dell Inc represents the combined revenues for Dell and EMC.
6 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure : Based on IDC Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, Q4 2017, April 2018, Vendor Revenue.
