Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

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!