By Anurag Agrawal on Sunday, 13 May 2018
Category: Infrastructure

Converged Infrastructure among Top 10 IT Priorities for SMBs and Midmarket businesses

SMB and Midmarket businesses are adopting Converged Infrastructure solutions for reduced cost and imrpoved IT efficiency. For slightly more than 1/3rd of small businesses and slightly less than 2/3rd of midmarket businesses, converged infrastructure solutions are among the top 10 IT priorities for 2018. Granted that by the end of year the actual penetration would be less but the very fact that CI/HCI has percolated to the top 10 is an interesting point to note. Cloud is everywhere, but Techaisle believes that efficiency is a reflection of the compute platform, not simply whether it is housed on-premise or at a remote facility and converged infrastructure contributes to the compute platform. SMBs are adopting converged infrastructure for one or more of five primary reasons:

  1. To benefit from integrated design and efficiency
  2. To tap into its ability to enable centralization/management of resources
  3. To capitalize on performance/time-to-benefit advantages
  4. To improve IT agility and its ability to meet business needs
  5. To respond to core requirements for cost savings and improved security.

In fact, 39% of midmarket firms said that converged infrastructure helps lower total cost of infrastructure ownership.

In its SMB & Midmarket research, Techaisle has looked closely at converged infrastructure – hardware-defined systems that integrate network, server, storage and management technology in a single package. In its survey of 1000+ US SMBs and 3000+ globally, Techaisle probed for converged infrastructure adoption drivers. As figure illustrates, lower operating costs are a significant adoption driver for SMBs as a group and (especially) for midmarket (100-999 employees) businesses. Both groups also cite reduced operating costs, efficient resource provisioning, business agility and CAPEX advantages as reasons for choosing to move ahead with converged infrastructure.

SMB TOP REASONS FOR ADOPTING CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Role of Converged Infrastructure solutions in a Cloud dominant IT environment

Cloud’s popularity isn’t simply a matter of it being a catch-phrase that resonates with both IT and business leaders; cloud is atop corporate to-do lists because it responds to critical organizational needs. Cloud is an efficient platform for IT service delivery. Because it is provisioned “as-a-Service,” cloud embeds professional support supplied by the cloud provider – a critical issue for SMBs, who have limited internal IT staff resources; and because it allows for customers to buy capacity on an as-needed basis, cloud aligns IT costs with business benefit. Lost in much of the cloud chatter, though, is the fact that there is a counterpoint for each of these widely-recognized cloud attributes:

HOW IS IT MANAGED WITHIN SMBs?

The business rationale for advanced on-premise solutions such as converged infrastructure solutions, especially, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) – systems that integrate compute, storage and networking in a highly-virtualized, software-defined, scalable solution – doesn’t simply rest on this ‘not-cloud’ analysis, however. Techaisle survey data shows that HCI offers real advantages to SMBs looking to optimize IT service delivery capacity and associated IT investment.