On Monday, I discussed how enterprises can extend their IT environments in 2015 to deploy big data and analytic workloads including enterprise Hadoop. In today’s blog, I envision the requisite evolution of data centers that are better suited to drive value from third platform applications in 2015 and beyond.
Why is the third platform so significant and disruptive?
In the last decade, IT has progressed to drive higher levels of availability, performance, security and adaptability for organizations to run business applications. This has created significant value to businesses, but still IT operations have been impeded by the rigid processes, siloed organizations and challenges of accessing and extracting value from structured and unstructured data.
The third platform is the next step in digitizing assets for the business. It is vital for organizations to embrace mobile assets and data with locational context, exchange information across private or public clouds, manage larger, faster data sets regardless of format, and incorporate exceptional insight from social media into operational activities.
The stakes are even higher for IT to empower businesses to differentiate themselves with the third platform applications, instead of simply getting to the baseline of running the second platform applications. We also see customers interested further in implementing enterprise Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to simplify deployment and scaling for a large number of emerging applications.
In the last year, VCE has helped customers become more competitive – and not only through innovative solutions – but also from the organizational and process transformation of running IT on an integrated system.
Often enough, organizational changes, such as adapting processes to suit new technologies, can be more challenging for enterprises than technological advancement. Many organizations continue to rely on legacy technologies because it’s risky and challenging to change how the business operates.
Cultures and behaviors are often even harder to adjust in getting value from the third platform. Being at the forefront of IT infrastructure evolution, VCE recognizes the importance of incorporating the most innovative, value driving advancements from our investors into the VCE solutions. Our pre-validated, factory-built approach with VCE support help our customers focus on transforming the business, while VCE makes IT simpler, more predictable and more repeatable when deploying and expanding the converged infrastructures across the enterprise.
VCE naturally extends this principle to the third platform applications. As business requirements and demands increase, customers can easily expand through VCE’s modular and flexible approach. The Vblock Systems and VCE™ technology extension for EMC® Isilon® storage provide the breadth and depth of technologies needed to optimize for dynamic business needs.
To further study the industry shifts, VCE sponsored IDC’s technology spotlight on “The Importance of a Modular and Flexible Approach to Integrated Infrastructure.”[footnote]IDC Technology Spotlight: The Importance of a Modular and Flexible Approach to Integrated Infrastructure, November 2014[/footnote] This IDC Technology Spotlight examines converged infrastructure systems that provide modular and scalable options for changing business demands. IDC specifically examines the VCE Vblock® System 540 with EMC XtremIO scale-out all-flash arrays and VCE™ technology extension for EMC® Isilon®.
These solutions drive lower latency and aggregate traditional and new types of workloads without compromising enterprise features. In particular, a modular, flexible architecture with easy upgrades, expansion and reusability has been the core tenet in increasing business value with insight and transactions from billions of users and millions of applications generated on the continuous basis.
With expanded use of unique scale-out, architecture, using all-flash and file-optimized storage solutions, IT can implement integrated infrastructure as an efficient way to provision systems at the project onset. Such modern use can also help IT meet or exceed service levels, empowering business to act on time-sensitive patterns, reliably complete high-volume transactions, and maintain continuity across data centers.
Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director, IDC
We expect 2015 to be the pivotal year for organizations to solidify their third platform investment strategies, including the reexamination of the infrastructure as part of the next progression of running IT for value creation. Breakthrough business models and discovery of new opportunities with run rate businesses rise through the effective use of third platform applications. VCE is excited to be part of this transformational journey by continuing to innovate on the modern infrastructures.
Contribute to the Conversation – What is your organization’s top business priority? How can IT aid the business through emerging applications and workloads that augment your existing investments? How do scale-out, consolidated solutions with low migration risks fit into your IT infrastructure?