HCI - Driving Real Business Results
All businesses have to transform and adapt to do business in an increasingly digital world. But to transform, they must first address the foundation that their business sits on, making converged infrastructure (CI) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) a great fit that enables efficiency and scalability on validated infrastructure.
Since 2012, HCI technology has offered even greater hardware and workload consolidation than its predecessor, CI. HCI has accelerated IT transformation through its software-defined infrastructure approach that does not require the level of storage and server management expertise needed to utilize CI.
Where is HCI now?
Over the last nine years, HCI has been leveraged by a number of large organizations looking to modernize their data centers and to build out public and private and cloud infrastructure.
In a recent survey conducted by ESG, more than 98% of transformed companies said they are using either converged infrastructure (CI) or HCI, and are running 35% of their applications on either platform. Moreover, the global HCI market size is expected to grow from USD 4.1 billion in 2018 to USD 17.1 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 32.9% during the forecast period. (Source)
These growth projections likely come as no surprise to organizations already using HCI. That is because most are seeing firsthand how HCI is supporting transformation and driving meaningful business value for their organizations.
Time is Money
Unlike the legacy approach, HCI is already engineered and validated prior to installation, so teams do not have to worry about spending time integrating components. This saves a significant amount of effort from IT management and staff, and frees up their time to work on more strategic and higher value projects.
Similarly, thanks to HCI’s consolidated interface that provides a comprehensive look at all IT components and significantly smaller hardware footprint, IT staff spend much less time monitoring components and allow for more reliable and consistent operations overall.
In fact, according to the ESG survey, organizations utilizing CI/HCI spent 31% less time on routine system management.
Not only is time saved, many of these organizations have seen significant cost savings. A smaller hardware footprint requires less levels of management thus translating into decreased operational costs like labor, power and cooling, and more. IT management in HCI/CI organizations reported a 21% to 30% reduction in operational expenditures.
Agility and speed lead to better service and competitive advantage
HCI technology accelerates IT transformation through faster application deployment and completion of integration tasks in a greater speed than ever before. This also increases the chances of getting to market faster than the competition.
Organizations using HCI/CI reported they were seven and half times more likely to complete most app deployments ahead of schedule, and were two and a half times as likely to be significant ahead of their competitors in time to market.
Through allowing for greater IT agility, HCI also creates a more cloud-like environment, enabling teams to provide IT as a service (ITaaS) experience to its users. This opens the door to even greater flexibility and faster response to business priorities, helping the organization work toward their digital transformation objectives. (Source)
These are just a few of the many benefits of large organizations have experienced integrating HCI technology into their businesses. The significant impact it has on saving time and costs are allowing IT to focus more resources and efforts into digitally transforming their organizations, and to contribute to greater strategic imperatives to the business.
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Interested in learning more? Check out this informative report from ESG on the role of CI and HCI in IT transformation.