Monthly Archives: July 2016

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Early Adopter Pain and Hyperconverged Excellence

Austin’s @pivot3 recent tweet of an @ITWire article about the projected growth in the HCIS (Hyperconverged Integrated Systems) market contain a couple of nuggets of information that demand expanding upon.  

First:  Hyperconvergence has yet to enter the mainstream.  

This is true.  The article states that while HCIS is the fastest growing segment it will be less than 1/4 of the integrated systems market by 2019. 

Innovators and early adopters are clearly benefiting from the fruits of hyperconvergence, namely software centric infrastructure built upon commodity hardware to deliver transparent solutions to internal and external stakeholders quickly and efficiently. That said early adopters are also on point to absorb the inevitable pain of industry upstarts and established giants finding and exploiting a particular market niche and redefining their solutions on a path to revenue nirvana. 

Pivots, acquisitions and chaos lay ahead for some. As evidence some friction has arisen between Dell and EMC as they struggle to understand how Nutanix fits into their new world order. 

Secondly:  Hyperconvergence use cases have been limited and silos have emerged.  

No kidding.  If you treat hyperconvergence like a traditional enterprise point solution, roll with a limited POC, and get frustrated when the touted benefits are not realized, then you deserve your fate.

Hyperconverged excellence requires a philosophical shift to a software first/software only mentality from the help desk to the CIO.  Hyperconverged excellence requires that you are willing to shrewdly assess your organization and act to make the necessary changes to be successful.  Blockers must be eliminated be they technological, cultural or personnel. Hyperconvergence holds great reward only for those organizations that understand the revolution at hand and have the courage to execute.  

The irony is that those that languish in perpetual POC hell will eventually abandon their infrastructure entirely for a public/private cloud solution managed by someone that achieved hyperconverged excellence long ago.