Converged infrastructure provides an agile, scalable foundation organizations can rely on as they change business processes and launch new services. For example, a healthcare organization can more quickly and cost effectively implement mandated electronic medical records systems while also implementing an infrastructure for the rapid development of new, data-intensive personalized medicine services.

Organizations in our study cited a range of business benefits from their converged IT infrastructure strategies, including lower operating costs (45%), greater IT staff productivity (44%), and improved business agility (41%). (See Figure 3.) Speed and agility are clearly important, and automating the management of compute, network, and storage resources into a single management pane is critical to improving availability and reducing costs via increased asset utilization across each datacenter resource.

While many organizations cite converged infrastructure benefits in terms of IT improvements, a higher percentage of future-ready organizations are seeing business benefits from their converged infrastructure. For example, comparing Future Creators with Current Focused, we see:

• 60% of Future Creators see greater IT staff productivity as a significant benefit delivered by converged infrastructure, while only 30% of Current Focused see it as a significant benefit.
• Compared with 25% of Current Focused, 51% of Future Creators see the ability to allocate IT staff to innovative projects as a significant benefit of converged infrastructure.
• Compared with 25% of Current Focused, 49% of Future Creators see greater business agility as a benefit of converged infrastructure.

Future Creators are measuring not only more frequently but also more accurately. They are most likely to use an integrated suite of tools to measure utilization rates (66%) and not rely on ad hoc or manual processes for measurement (66%) compared with Current Focused (35%).

Future Creators differ from less future-ready organizations in other ways as well. They are more likely to treat their IT infrastructure as a resource pool with common provisioning (23% of Future Creators versus 11% of Current Focused). Future Creators are also more likely to have a programmatic, predetermined upgrade path for infrastructure compared with all other segments; for example, 33% of Future Creators upgrade datacenter infrastructure at predetermined intervals versus 15% of Current Focused.

IDC notes that even though Future Creators are most likely to have a predetermined upgrade path for their datacenter infrastructure, they are also most likely to upgrade their datacenter infrastructure on an ad-hoc basis (37% of Future Creators upgrade datacenter infrastructure on an ad-hoc basis compared with 24% of Current Focused). Future Creators are increasingly able to predict both where and when they will need capacity and where and when to add, so they are also the most agile and responsive to business needs.

A look across all the benefits organizations see from their converged infrastructure shows that operating costs are the only area cited as a greater benefit by the least future-ready organizations:

• 57% of Current Focused organizations see lower operating costs as a significant benefit of converged infrastructure compared with only 46% of Future Creators. This implies that the least future-ready organizations are more focused on using converged infrastructure for cost take-out in comparison with future-ready organizations, which are more likely to consider their IT infrastructure as a way to drive business agility and productivity and treat it as a source of differentiation and competitive advantage.

Future-ready enterprises are making the organizational changes necessary to get the most benefits from their converged infrastructure. They are actively looking to differentiate their business using applications, data, and infrastructure while deferring more responsibility for IT automation and configuration management to their development teams. This effort is often associated with the second aspect — cloud — of the future-ready enterprise. They are aggressive adopters of a “cloud first” model for application development and delivery.