HCI Adoption Is Driven by a Need to Bring Cloud Operations On-premises and Accelerate Innovation

ESG recently completed a survey of 2,000 IT decision makers to understand whether, and to what degree, organizations’ comprehensive technology transformations are reinforcing broad and deep competitive advantages. The study focused on organizations’ progress delivering modern digital end-user experiences, innovating with data, and more flexibly delivering IT services. Organizations making the most progress across all three of these areas were categorized as Technology Accelerators and ESG observed that these organizations do in fact outperform their peers lagging in these transformations (Technology Reactors) in many areas.

A subset of 612 IT decision makers directly involved in managing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) at their organizations are the focus of this summary. The survey asked these respondents how the use of HCI is delivering benefits for their organizations. ESG also sought to understand if, and to what degree, HCI is providing a foundation for the organizations to achieve their on-premises as-a-Service and cloud operations goals. The research showed that organizations using HCI to support the majority of their on-premises workloads, referred to as “HCI Accelerators,” are:

• Reducing time spent on infrastructure deployment by 40% and reducing ongoing system management task time by 41%.
• Using HCI-enabled time savings and automation, particularly in day-2 operations, to deliver 59% more of their total IT environment as-a-Service.
• Using as-a-Service to speed cloud project completion, application development timelines, and get to market faster.
• More likely than those using HCI more selectively to drive a high degree of infrastructure management tool consolidation (27% versus 20%) across their entire environment, allowing them to explore more hybrid operating models.