Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

In a recent briefing with George Crump, Chief Marketing Officer of StorONE, we learned about Seagate and StorONE’s latest offering that is designed to provide affordable high-performance and high-capacity storage solutions. The offering from StorONE, which became available in early March 2021 and features Seagate’s drives, was created specifically with a focus on databases, virtualization video surveillance, file, backup, and archive capability.

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The Influx of Digital Efforts

2020 was a challenging year for people and business alike. As we look to 2021 and the future, businesses have shifted and ramped up the focus on digital transformation initiatives. These initiatives are emerging from the need for a remote workforce and increased digital marketing and sales efforts, fueled in part by an influx in budget from reduced travel. This more digital mindset means more customers are looking online to experience everything from shopping to virtual travel to social events and more—and companies are scrambling to accelerate their digital transformation efforts to meet the need.

The responses from ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey clearly show that budgets are being reallocated to support these digital initiatives. The data shows that 65% of organizations that have mature digital transformation initiatives will increase IT spending for 2021, with 60% of initiatives in early stages and 56% in planning only stages. This is compared to 27% of respondents with no digital transformation initiatives on their roadmap.

Overall, the data shows the year-over-year percentage increase in digital transformation initiatives for 2021 IT budget over 2020 as follows:

• Mature projects: 4.33% increase 
• Early stage projects: 3.2% increase
• Planning projects: 2.05% increase year 

Note that the percentages may seem negligible, but when considering the typical enterprise IT budget, it is significant.  

The data also indicates that 59% of mature organizations are looking to move on-premises workloads to the public cloud in 2021 in an effort to support these initiatives. This is largely due to the increase in focus to adopt digital tools to optimize collaboration, increase operational efficiencies, and provide differentiated ways to connect with customers.

Driving Toward Results

In my brief on Public Cloud and Digital Initiatives for 2021, I analyzed the data from the Technology Spending survey and came away with a few essential takeaways.

• Nearly 75% of organizations report either having mature digital transformation initiatives or that they are currently implementing and executing various digital transformation initiatives.
• Business project teams may start by deploying in public clouds (or by adopting containers), then may seek the option to deploy across hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

The past six months have caused cloud users to push the accelerator even more. The maturity of these organizations also may be considered. Adding serverless and containers as part of the strategy is also a consideration in conjunction to co-exist in a heterogeneous environment with the public cloud.

The Proof Is in the Data

There is no mistake in the momentum of public cloud adoption. Digital transformation initiatives reap the benefits of the cloud, but they also need to leverage the existing business infrastructure. This is why application and infrastructure modernization is so critical to the success of future-focused businesses.  

As you can see in the following chart, organizations are focused on driving operational efficiencies. But it’s important to also note that 25% of these businesses are developing entirely new business models. This paradigm shift will require a new way of interacting with existing, heritage systems such as databases, ERP, and other workloads. To bridge the gap, businesses will need to adapt with not only new resource skills to accommodate these new models, but also find new ways to interact with their customers through modernized front-end applications.

Next Steps for Businesses

Organizations will need to ask when and if the larger strategy drives digital initiatives to the public cloud. Business approaches, as well as the success, can vary based on the execution of the project, including: The go-to-market and routes-to-market, the impact to the existing business model and transition to the next, the ability of your internal resources to execute the new strategy, etc. These approaches should be considered prior to executing and pivoting the business into a new direction.

The bottom line is you need to continue to sell your products and services to the marketplace – but the traditional methodology of doing so is no longer a viable option. As your customer is forced to digitally transform, so are you. You can either embrace the new paradigm of digital marketing-based selling versus old school methods, or you will find that your competition will. Customers are not going to go back to relying on trade shows – they have already spoken loudly and clearly – sell to me the way I want to be sold to or get out of the way.

Clearly, business evolution is inevitable. Adopting current trends and new business models is a way to strengthen the way you connect with your customer base. For example, having the ability to deliver your offering in the cloud is expected from most clients and customers. This allows businesses to shift costs from a large initial investment to an operational investment based on how clients want to consume your offering.

Cloud does not necessarily mean you can stand up an offering on a new infrastructure. It also may define how your offering is built or modernized to take advantage of the new resources. For example, being cloud-resident is not often good enough. The offering should have the ability to leverage a modern, elastic infrastructure. Scale up, scale down, and scale out as appropriate.

Cloud-ready applications are moving up in cloud maturity but having a cloud-native ability allows the offering to take full advantage of the resources and infrastructure. Also, this ability makes the offering competitive and cost-effective by using fewer resources like serverless or containers for microservices.

Here are top key points from the respondents to the ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions survey:

• Public cloud infrastructure (including serverless) adoption has almost doubled in five years.
• Nearly half of organizations now have a cloud-first strategy.
• Nearly 8 in 10 remaining on-premises workloads will move to cloud candidates over the next five years.

These points support the importance of fully understanding the public cloud adoption for new digital initiatives.

In fact, business are sending far less people to shows or in-person meetings due to the pandemic but we find that this trend will continue and in-person events will become less popular. Business will rely on other sources of education and digital initiatives are driving towards these efforts.

The ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions survey indicates that the top two ways to gain customer confidence are product reviews and product evaluations.  

• Product reviews: 45% of respondents find these most valuable
• Product evaluation/performance testing: 42% of respondents find these most valuable

Based on the survey data, this  type of content is critical for potential buyers to learn about, research, and evaluate IT products and services. Providing this type of information this way will get the most traction for educating audiences.

Interested in learning more? Download my brief, Public Cloud and Digital Transformation Initiatives for 2021, to read more on this topic.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) continues to be a growth area for many businesses and business lines. This is largely due to the simplified approach for driving and deploying new digital business initiatives. In fact, HCI can often be a simpler way to kick off new initiatives with no impact to core IT organizations within the business. For this reason, HCI deployments are seeing growth that enables business units to rapidly stand up new projects without impacting IT.

Looking in to 2021 and beyond, our research shows that overall IT industry trends include increasing numbers of new initiatives that focus on:

• Digital transformation.
• Shifting from on-premises to cloud adoption.
• Application modernization and security.

Across the technology industry, these three areas are where business is facing new challenges. The global economy continues to move toward digital transformation, while the delivery of products and services is evolving based on this direction. Those businesses that stay in the traditional product and services arena will likely not survive into the 2020s.

These larger trends are playing into how HCI is trending. Let’s take a look at where HCI has been and my top 5 predictions about where it is going in 2021…and beyond.

The Future Is Now

In September 2018, I wrote a Forbes article, titled Modernized HCI Data Protection Practices Lead To Digital Transformation. When writing this article, I was focusing on future trends and predictions, without the prescience of knowing that a pandemic would further accelerate these efforts. In the past three years, the HCI market has rapidly grown in the direction I described then, and the future shows no sign of stopping.

Specifically, the Forbes article focused on the following:

• Migrate existing workloads
• Understand the impact of migrating your existing hypervisor
• Leverage native file and block services
• Expand the data center to the edge
• Set up native cloud disaster recovery

As we continue to drive hypercomputing infrastructure into 2020, many of the points covered then are valid today and, in some cases, the direction is even more rapidly accelerating from 2018. 

1. Digital Transformation (still) Starts with Hyperconverged Infrastructure

In 2020, increasing numbers of digital business transformation initiatives amplified the direction just described (and covered in further detail in my 2018 article). This accelerated pace of adoption drove enterprise agility and is largely from these kinds of digital initiatives combined with the ability to quickly migrate workloads to HCI as well as to the cloud. According to ESG Research on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure Trends,  87% of IT managers said that HCI made IT more agile, with 25% stating HCI makes IT significantly more agile.

Migrating existing workloads is the direction for future HCI adoption. The reason is that HCI reduces the requirement for server and storage management resources and expertise, making migration to the platform easier than traditional deployments. HCI and software-defined storage (SDS) are the foundation for digital transformation initiatives and provide rapid time to value, without requiring more expertise.

2. Public Cloud Services Are an Option to On-premises Storage Infrastructure

Leveraging the cloud and native HCI platform file services allows your digital initiatives to optimize workloads, leverage data storage services, migrate away from silos, and create unified infrastructure–all residing on the same, high-performance platform. Cloud storage and strategies are no different, which is why public cloud infrastructure is gaining popularity.

This point is validated in a 2019 ESG in-depth survey of IT and data storage professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and managing data storage technology products and services. The survey respondents indicated that at least twice as many IT professionals are as likely to consider public cloud storage infrastructure as better than on-premises alternatives when it comes to total cost of ownership, ease of purchase, automation, and ease of evaluation. And this includes using HCI for on-premises and cloud-based deployments.

3. Edge Is Increasing in Priority to Digital Businesses

The increase in a remote workforce has accelerated edge adoption. IT organization investments are increasing based on this new business model, which also applies to edge-based resources. This trend will drive cloud adoption for these types of deployments to enable rapid responses to evolving business models, enabling the business to dynamically scale with no impact to the core business.

New Emerging Trends – Modernization with Intelligence

4. Application modernization will force CIOs to look for opportunities to move to next-generation digital platforms that leverage HCI and cloud-native approaches that modernize infrastructure and applications. This modernization delivers dynamic functionality and supports rapid development of new products, processes and services to enhance the customer experience. As part of this approach, DevOps will need to include the ability to leverage the container and the orchestration layers to provide burst capabilities to keep pace with increasing digital experience demands.
5. Other IT trends that will be leveraging HCI platforms are artificial intelligence and machine learning. Forward-thinking businesses will customize their digital experiences to focus on the personalization of customer profiles. The product, service, and process will (or soon will) have the capability to dynamically adjust based on the customer persona and adapt in real time to how the customer is interacting with the business. This direction is gaining traction in all aspects of the digital experience platforms and applies to hyperconverged infrastructure deployments as well.

How Will These Trends Impact Your Organization?

Technology is evolving faster and is now able to process data in ways that were unheard just a few years ago. The lines between technology and the intersection with people and process that are using the platforms are blurring. The adoption of HCI platforms, whether on-prem or in the cloud or a hybrid approach, is less important than the transparency of information provided from these platforms. The future is about driving experiences regardless of where the information lives. How ready is your organization?

Did you know: 71% of technology decision makers use research-based thought leadership materials to vet a company’s capabilities?

I actually used to be one of those decision-makers before recently joining Enterprise Strategy Group as a senior analyst, but before I get ahead of myself, let me step back and introduce myself.

When I look back, it seems like everything I have done in my career has led up to this moment. I have spent the past 25 years in the tech industry developing go-to-market strategies, identifying new routes to market, and creating and expanding partner ecosystems (three things we do in spades for our clients here at ESG).

I’ve held executive, product management/marketing, and partner alliances roles in corporations large and small. I worked in household name companies (Dell EMC, NetApp, VMware, IBM, Emerson) as well as mid-sized vendors (Progress Software, Kentico) and smaller startups such as DataCore, Unitrends, and HYCU.

Most recently, I led marketing strategy and execution for the search, recommendation, and digital experience platform offerings at AmericanEagle.com. Exciting and challenging at the same time.

My technology interests and experience range across digital experience platforms, content management & application integration, data protection, hyperconverged infrastructure, virtualization and infrastructure modernization (on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-native). At ESG, I’ll be calling on those experiences to help expand our Infrastructure Modernization and Application Modernization coverage.

Simply put, in my new role as an analyst, I’m looking forward to taking all that I’ve learned across all of these areas in all my prior roles to help ESG clients make better decisions and achieve better business outcomes.

Transition from Practitioner to Analyst

I thoroughly enjoyed my career in the vendor space and could continue pursuing this direction, but it was always in the back of my mind that an analyst role would be my sweet spot. As an analyst, I could give back to the professional community and help elevate the tech industry in some small way. I believe, as an analyst, my previous experience, my intellectual curiosity, and my respect for research and data, combined with my ability to synthesize it to extract helpful insights is what I hope to bring forward to ESG and our clients.

For example, in ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, we found that a key focus for businesses in the coming year is to continue to leverage cloud technologies to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. In fact, cloud applications and infrastructure are at this point a de facto prerequisite for successful transformation projects. For vendors, communicating the “what and why” of this message to the business community is key to helping drive well-informed strategy decisions. My role at ESG will help drive additional discussions and research in this area about how infrastructure and application modernization trends will drive business results over the next five years.

Expanding Horizons!

The fact that ESG is now a part of TechTarget is also very exciting to me, not only from the development and creation of building assets, messaging, and materials to support our client’s go-to-market activities, but in conjunction with TechTarget, ESG now has the ability to build powerful content, drive complete marketing campaigns, and leverage the BrightTALK platform for delivering these messages.

It is awesome to be part of this journey with ESG and I look forward to working with all of you as well to continue the conversations and discussions on how we can make your companies grow and exceed your business targets!