Convergence Helps In Maximising Return On Assets

As IT leaders and business decision makers strategise their IT infrastructure roadmap, the question that they really need to find an answer to is whether they should consider converged infrastructure as a business imperative, and if so, how they can leverage it effectively to their advantage. The six city Biztech2.com Business Imperatives Forum: Solutions for Success, powered by Dell sought to address the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of converged infrastructure.

Presenting an editor’s perspective Ivor Soans, Managing Editor for Enterprise Technology at Network 18, highlighted the current datacentre challenges. “Most of the companies have IT resources deployed in a silo like fashion, lowering productivity and agility while increasing the maintenance and operations costs,” he explained. Given the challenges, Soans pointed out that ease of management, simplicity, single point of contact and accountability, and need for IT consolidation were some of the major drivers for the move towards a converged infrastructure. Additionally, the entire drive towards private cloud is further pushing the demand for it.

Giving an expert’s view, Sridhar S., Director - Enterprise Solutions Business, India, emphasised on the fact that convergence doesn’t mean that many devices or hardware components will die out; rather convergence opens up opportunities where even legacy hardware components can be leveraged. “Organisations will first have to do an honest assessment and then decide where they want to go. Looking for solutions comes next, and Dell tries to offer simplicity, flexibility and completeness all at one place,” he explained.

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Rangarajan Narayanan, Senior VP and Director, Exilant Technologies and Ravinder Vaswan, Director-IT, Informatica later joined Sridhar and Soans to discuss their infrastructure pain points and debated whether converged infrastructure was the silver bullet to their IT woes.

Sharing his experience, Narayanan said, “Our biggest challenge was to have a centralised IT when our business was growing in different geographies. Convergence helped us not only by solving the present challenge but it also gave us a very scalable platform.”

Answering one of the questions from the audience Vaswan said, “Convergence of infrastructure is not just about virtualisation nor it’s about saving money. It is about how you plan your infrastructure based on your business requirements. Every business has specific requirements and convergence may not be the answer to everything, but it definitely helps aligning business and IT.”

The panel further discussed why converged infrastructure is important and how IT leaders and decision makers can take an intelligent and strategic approach that keeps the CFO happy even whilst ensuring IT-Business Alignment. The CFO is always looking for Return On Assets (ROA), and convergence helps in maximising that ROA.

For enterprises who have decided to undertake the journey towards convergence, Soans advised that CIOs should look for simplicity, flexibility, completeness and quality. Further, the Dell expert suggested virtualisation as a good starting point. The process of moving from legacy infrastructure to a converged one starts with virtualisation, and that’s a good journey to start with, cited the Dell expert.