EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Serverless computing, containers, IoT, DevOps, mobile workspaces and of course hybrid cloud are all technologies -and of course excellent buzzwords- with immediate impact on your organization’s security. Each one of these technologies increases the speed and agility of corporate IT, enabling your company to beat the competition. As enterprise IT complexity is exploding, this year’s RSA Conference attracted over 400 exhibitors and 45,000 attendees which makes it one of the largest IT events of the year, even bigger than the 2016 Amazon Re:Invent show.

EMA estimates that enterprises today waste over 50% of their IT budgets on inefficient application workload placement, configuration and management. As a side effect, they introduce tremendous operational risk in terms of security, regulatory compliance, performance and reliability.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about why we haven’t come all that far in machine learning and artificial intelligence over the previous decade. Today, Keen Browne, Bonsai’s Co-founder and Head of Product, summed it up for me in a concise manner: “The tools really suck and are meant for scientists and mathematicians, not for people who work for the line of business.”

Today, HPE paid $650 to acquire Simplivity. HPE paid this sizeable amount mainly to acquire OmniStack, Simplivity’s data virtualization software platform. OmniStack’s central value proposition is OPEX reduction through the elimination of traditional infrastructure management tasks. In short, Simplivity enables customers to manage their infrastructure at the virtual machine (VM) – level. Please note that there will be a separate EMA Impact Brief covering this topic in much more detail.

Customers in 2017 will demand solutions to claim back today’s massive CAPEX and OPEX waste of over 50% of their total IT spend. All our 2017 predictions are directly derived from the rapidly increasing pressure to reclaim these resources and leverage them to achieve direct business advantages in today’s highly competitive and fast moving marketplace.

In an ideal world, customers would be able to fully take advantage of the benefits of hybrid cloud by rationally matching infrastructure parameters -cost, performance, reliability, availability, security, regulatory compliance, scalability- with the requirements and dependencies of each application.

As we -Evan and I- were ranting last week about how OpenStack and VMware fit together (see #EMACloudRants), we were mainly focusing on the central conundrum that VMware faces within this context: “Should we support an open platform that could commoditize away a substantial part of our profitable infrastructure business or should we ignore the threat and do our own thing”

As promised in my previous post on “Software Defined Storage – Why Customers Should Care”, I want to follow-up with a brief overview of the competitive landscape.

Evan Quinn and I have been collecting popular customer questions for a while and wanted to share our thoughts on these questions in the form of a new format: EMA CLOUD RANTS. Each week we will discuss one of the hot topics in enterprise IT to provide the viewer with rapid analyst insights, without any fluff. Here goes the first one:

Of course, I always encourage practitioners to carefully study the full EMA research report on the “Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center” or at least read the research study summary or at the very least join the EMA SDDC Research webinar on February 18, but I still want to briefly summarize the key findings here.