In a market of constant innovation, only the fastest enterprises will survive.
This was the word from Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, in a keynote address at the VMworld 2013 Conference, in Barcelona, yesterday.
Gelsinger noted that enterprises have moved from the mainframe era to the client server era and are now in the mobile cloud era. He revealed that the forces shaping IT today are social, mobile, cloud and big data.
According to Gelsinger, most enterprises used to spend only 30% of their IT budgets on innovation, while the rest was used for maintenance. However, virtualisation technologies mean organisations now spend roughly 50% on innovation and the other 50% on maintenance.
Thus, he pointed out that enterprises need new architectures to keep up with disruptive technologies. "Organisations need to liberate their resources in order to drive innovation," he said.
Virtualisation has the potential to promote innovation and the liberation of resources from the client server world into the mobile cloud world, he said.
When resources are liberated, apps get rolled out at the required speed and provisioning a production environment takes minutes. Organisations can also routinely deploy any workload, anywhere, he said.
For Gelsinger, enterprises are challenged with having to deal with millions of apps, each with unique requirements. "CIOs are also facing the challenge to speed up IT; operations teams need to meet application SLAs; CFOs need to improve return on investment; end-users demand great experience; and global workforces need access anywhere. Virtual infrastructure delivers these infrastructure and business needs," said Gelsinger.
The answer to these challenges lies with running IT as a service business, according to Gelsinger. Describing the building blocks for delivering IT as a service, he pointed to the software-defined data centre, end-user computing and mobile cloud.
Software-defined data centres transform storage by aligning it with app demands and also expand virtual computing to all apps, he said. The software-defined data centre also virtualises the network for speed and efficiency, while management tools give way to automation.
According to Gelsinger, software-defined storage dynamically matches the right storage to each application and pools resources together for efficiency.
Also speaking during the event, Ramin Sayar, senior VP and GM for cloud management at VMware, said: "For IT to keep pace with business demands, stay relevant and deliver IT services with agility, it must transition from being builders to brokers of IT services."
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