For many of us in the IT industry, hype bubbles tend to form quickly and dissipate just as fast. Today’s next big thing may not always end up as such.
A good way to gauge a technology’s potential is to look at the sales growth numbers when compared to the decline of technologies that a new innovation is replacing. For those that watched the meteoric rise of #VMware, hyperconvergence is exhibiting clear similarities. With year-on-year growth of over 100 percent according to IDC - all the while traditional server and storage markets remain stagnant – it’s clear that hyperconvergence and the move to the enterprise cloud is the way forward, and not just a fad.
In a decade where much of the channel has switched from selling tin to offering services, it may seem odd that the convergence of compute, storage and networking within an effective appliance model should be so resurgent. The reality is that #hyperconverged solves an inherent problem for customers that are desperate to reduce the cost and complexity of ‘plumbing’ needed to support virtualisation and cloud.
The days of channel making a comfortable living wiring up servers and storage are not over, but are certainly numbered. Yet hyperconvergence as just a way of reducing physical infrastructure costs and complexity is not just why the channel is embracing the concept. The rational is simple; if customers can reduce the cost of hardware and related implementation and maintenance, these budgets can be shifted to higher value activities, above the hypervisor, which can aid the core business drivers of the wider organisation.
That could be building more innovative mobile applications to enhance customer experience, resilient disaster recovery, or apps that improve employee productivity, or the shift from physical to virtual desktops improving the user experience or even putting more budget towards strengthening security to meet more virulent cyber security threats. What the channel is grasping is that hyperconverged systems are not a threat but an opportunity to get higher up the value stack and reaffirm relationships with clients in their journey to digital business.
If, as a partner, you read this article and you don’t have a hyperconvergence strategy, I can guarantee at some point your customers will press you about deploying such a system. Stalling is a not a long term option. The reality is that as the inevitable server upgrade comes around, or your customers’ virtualisation moves from test and dev to full production systems, the attractiveness of hyperconverged systems as an alternative to build-your-own is incredibly seductive. And it’s not just the big customers. Hyperconverged infrastructure projects can start small and can grow in small increments, in line with the IT and business needs. What normally happens is that this first encounter with hyperconvergence quickly leads to expansion. On average 50 percent of customers will buy more after six months, and more than 70 percent buys more after 12 months. Most customers double hyperconverged infrastructure spending within a year, driven by the high satisfaction and simple way of expanding capacity and performance as they see fit.
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