The move to converged infrastructure frees organisations from traditional, siloed infrastructure models towards solutions that offer agile, elastic, on-demand, and end-to-end services.
This is according to Tom O'Reilly, MEA CTO for converged infrastructure provider VCE, who spoke to ITWeb recently.
Converged infrastructure is an approach to data centre management that relies on a specific vendor and the vendor's partners to provide pre-configured bundles of hardware and software in a single chassis.
O'Reilly says organisations are spending 70% of their IT budgets just to keep their "lights on", and this leaves them with 30% to use for innovation and growth.
In a market full of challenges, businesses need to build a strategy for growth that is intuitive, dynamic and interactive, with the necessary agility to sense and respond to customers or markets faster than ever before.
Through converged infrastructure, organisations are able to deploy next-generation IT that enables them to create a bridge between their current applications and the cloud, notes O'Reilly.
By transforming the way companies run their IT, they have an opportunity to save money and allocate budget to take on new challenges like cloud, big data and mobility.
Forrester Research's report reveals IT professionals are struggling to evolve their infrastructure to meet the daunting scalability, performance, and rapid provisioning challenges created by the latest generation of virtualisation, cloud, and unstructured data storage workloads.
One way IT managers can transform their infrastructure and modernise their storage strategy is through converged solutions, says Forrester.
The industry is moving from the era of traditional applications to the next-generation cloud apps. Through this transformation, businesses are forced to focus not so much on the infrastructure but on the apps they offer.
According to Servaas Venter, country manager at EMC Southern Africa, today's businesses are increasingly in the market for complete solutions, rather than a set of point products.
Converged solutions make cloud very easy, for partner and customer alike, he says. "We should not underestimate just how big a change it is for organisations to move from the tried and tested IT model."
Some customers are simply not ready for a wholesale move to the cloud while others prefer to leverage existing IT investments.
These solutions let customers continue to leverage their existing resources and expertise while at the same time starting their cloud journey at a rate that suits them.
It also provides them with the choice of which vendor solutions they deploy across the cloud.
For organisations, this choice provides peace of mind, while for partners looking to deploy their own clouds, it offers an excellent path to service differentiation, Venter says.
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