Converged infrastructure (CI) is a hit in the C suite, and not just among CIOs. Chief marketing officers (CMOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) have also become champions of converged infrastructure, although often for different reasons.
In this three-part series, I’ll examine how converged infrastructure solutions like the VCE Vblock appeal to the different sweet spots of the C suite.
Change, risk and disruption represent the new normal for many of today’s enterprises. Yet CFOs need to manage financial operations with predictability, stability and sustainability in mind. It’s a hard balance to strike, but CFOs are finding that converged infrastructure (CI) can go a long way toward normalizing not only their capital and operating expenses but also their revenue flow.
There are four key reasons why CFOs see real value in CI solutions such as VCE’s Vblock systems:
1. It saves (a lot of) money.
Purchasing a converged infrastructure system is like one-stop shopping for IT. Everything you need to run business applications—storage, networking and compute resources—is combined in a single appliance. Just as with automobiles, buying a pre-built solution is cheaper than building it yourself from parts. How much cheaper? In a recent study, IDC found that VCE’s Vblock systems cut storage, networking and processor costs in half.
2. It puts predictability back into IT purchasing.
Consolidating IT resources into a single appliance also returns predictability to IT spending. Enterprises can expect to upgrade hardware every three to five years, which can be a complex and unpredictable cost to manage when you’re buying a new RAID storage system one year and new servers the next year. With CI systems, you’re buying everything at the same time, so you can upgrade everything at once and predict costs over a three- to five-year span. This process is also cheaper from an operational perspective because you’re essentially changing all of the light bulbs at once versus replacing them throughout the year.
3. It minimizes risk.
CI systems such as VCE’s Vblock are pre-integrated, pre-validated and built on industry standards, which greatly reduces the risk associated with deploying new technology in the enterprise environment. As a result, CFOs can count on expected savings and performance improvements rather than re-adjust their numbers as deployments are pushed out and project costs escalate. Standards-based systems also aid in compliance to industry standards such as PCI DSS and HIPAA.
4. It accelerates time to revenue.
One of the primary reasons that business users look beyond the enterprise to hosted Cloud providers is the need for speed and agility. Converged infrastructure systems provide that speed and agility in house, allowing business teams to launch new applications quickly and securely into the market. CI systems also make it easier to charge back IT resources to individual groups, because costs are tracked as a percentage of a single appliance rather than across several different appliances and systems.
As car manufacturers are fond of saying, mileage may vary with different CI systems, so it’s important to choose both a proven platform and an experienced provider. As a trusted partner to Cisco, EMC, VMware and VCE, Rolta AdvizeX can help you get the maximum ROI and savings using VCE’s industry-leading Vblock systems.
Next week: “Four Reasons Why CMOs Love CI.” ▪