Servers & Converged Infrastructure

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1 Servers & Converged Infrastructure Budgets and Outlook Quarterly Advisory Report Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook 2017

2 Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure provides you with actionable data and insight to understand the key dynamics driving standard server and converged infrastructure markets. Combining 451 Research s industry-leading analysis with an extensive network of more than 60,000 senior IT professionals, Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure tracks the disruption occurring in the market and exposes the major opportunities for enterprises, vendors, suppliers and investors. Voice of the Enterprise: Servers & Converged Infrastructure product features Approximately 600 quarterly web-based surveys with IT end-user decision-makers on a worldwide basis. 18 interviews quarterly with leading-edge senior IT executives, providing a narrative view of the market. Sampling that is a representative of small, midsize and large enterprises in private and public sectors. Data-driven deliverables for fast access and ability to perform segmentation work. Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

3 The 451 Take In coming years, the settling point between on- and off-premises IT deployments will be apparent, or at least more clear. Meanwhile, cloud migration continues, impacting decisions of IT managers who must efficiently plan for the future of their internal hardware requirements. In turn, we continue to see positive server spend, but the makeup of deployments and related IT strategies is changing. The crunch of IT skills deficiencies and datacenter consolidation combines to pressure overall investment in IT infrastructure, leading to increased interest in and adoption of IT management tools that increase process orchestration and automation. However, work remains in transitioning enterprises into machine-led management processes. While many organizations spend hours (or at worst, days) on average to deploy internal hardware resources, a host of others are stuck in a quagmire of weeks or months for provisioning. These are the same organizations that have little faith in the promise of machine learning and AI in terms of IT simplification in their environments. A perpetual bright spot for preservation of on-premises infrastructure is hyperconverged, which is helping transition firms into at least partial IT transformation. Adopters consider the technology to be critical in their efforts to modernize their environments and, ultimately, become more cloudlike. Agility remains a key goal among IT leaders, who continually face business executives who understand and appreciate the speed and flexibility of public cloud. Depending on the industry, use case and customer base, many workloads simply do not (yet) fit public cloud deployment. But the pressure is on IT management to ensure that the infrastructure behind those workloads is as seamless and invisible as possible to mimic typical public cloud production. Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

4 Summary of Findings Despite ongoing cloud migration, on-premises servers retain viability. About a third of respondents plan to decrease the number of their on-premises physical servers in 2018 due to increased virtualization and server density, along with workload migration to public cloud services. However, most of the remaining sample plans to either increase or make no change to their footprint. On-premises requirements remain crucial for project-specific business requirements. The length of hardware provisioning time reveals gaps in IT modernization. In general, organizations are finding success in efforts to decrease the time required to provision internal hardware resources. However, much work remains, particularly in large organizations and industries with complex IT environments, and among organizations still mired in manual IT infrastructure management approaches. Hyperconverged adoption continues as IT teams build on efforts to cloudify their environments. As organizations of all sizes adopt or consider hyperconverged infrastructure, the impact on their IT environments and the broader IT market is becoming more clear. For example, 59% of hyperconverged adopters have decreased spending on standalone x86 servers as a result of that adoption. Still-nascent machine learning and AI will find champions in automated environments. The more automated the IT environment, the more likely that IT professionals will recognize the potential in machine learning and AI to simplify their IT management. Much work remains in convincing the entire market of those benefits, but the first step is ensuring basic automation and orchestration is underway. Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

5 Appendix: Respondent Demographics

6 Respondent Demographics Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

7 Respondent Demographics (continued) Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

8 Respondent Demographics (continued) Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

9 About the Christian Perry Research Manager, Infrastructure, Voice of the Enterprise Christian Perry is a Research Manager covering IT infrastructure at 451 Research. In this role, Christian manages the Voice of the Enterprise products built on 451 Research s proprietary global network of senior IT decision-makers covering datacenter, server and converged infrastructure topics. With more than 20 years of experience tracking and analyzing the IT datacenter market, Christian brings broad market knowledge to research around traditional technologies and emerging infrastructure such as converged, hyperconverged and software-defined technologies. Prior to joining 451 Research, Christian was practice manager and principal analyst at Technology Business Research, where he directed the firm s datacenter infrastructure research. Christian also held roles at Comdex, Treehouse Software, and Sandhills Publishing, and nearly 1,000 of his articles have appeared in technology publications including Processor, Smart Computing, PC Today, Baseline, and others. Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook

10 Servers & Converged Infrastructure: Budgets and Outlook 2017