ESG Blogs

The world is complex. When looking at today’s already complex world, it seems as though complexity continues to grow day by day. No industry understands complexity better than the healthcare industry. Rules, compliance, and regulation are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dealing with day-to-day challenges. The fluctuations of and increasing demands on healthcare systems around the world continue to grow everywhere throughout the industry at large hospitals, remote satellite sites, or a combination of both. The ability to pass patient data from location to location can often mean the difference in saving lives.

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing with Ben Bolles, Vice President of Products; and Mike Koponen, Senior Director, Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances, at Pivot3 discussing their latest launch. It was interesting to see the advances in the hyperconverged infrastructure space and the differentiation Pivot3 is bringing to market.

When we look at Pivot3’s core areas, it is clear they are competing in a large market, but they keep the focus on video surveillance. This is a market segment that is clearly gaining adoption, not only at the data center core but also at the edge and in the cloud.

When digital initiatives evolve in the data center, so too should your ability to choose how you consume IT resources. The desire to move to the cloud has some IT leaders intrigued, yet they continue to look into ways to maximize their existing IT investment and bridge the gap to get to the cloud. This has many IT leaders not moving to the cloud just yet but preferring to buy infrastructure via a consumption-based model such as a monthly subscription based on resource utilization for their on-premises data center.

IBM’s Eric Herzog, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of Worldwide Storage Channels, briefed us at ESG on the recent IBM Storage announcement launch focused on modernization infrastructure for the edge, core, and hybrid cloud. This post will cover key elements in this launch where IBM’s focus is on Spectrum Fusion HCI and the importance of edge, core, and hybrid cloud as well as simplifying Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes.

In a recent briefing with George Crump, Chief Marketing Officer of StorONE, we learned about Seagate and StorONE's latest offering that is designed to provide affordable high-performance and high-capacity storage solutions. The offering from StorONE, which became available in early March 2021 and features Seagate’s drives, was created specifically with a focus on databases, virtualization video surveillance, file, backup, and archive capability.

The Influx of Digital Efforts

2020 was a challenging year for people and business alike. As we look to 2021 and the future, businesses have shifted and ramped up the focus on digital transformation initiatives. These initiatives are emerging from the need for a remote workforce and increased digital marketing and sales efforts, fueled in part by an influx in budget from reduced travel. This more digital mindset means more customers are looking online to experience everything from shopping to virtual travel to social events and more—and companies are scrambling to accelerate their digital transformation efforts to meet the need.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) continues to be a growth area for many businesses and business lines. This is largely due to the simplified approach for driving and deploying new digital business initiatives. In fact, HCI can often be a simpler way to kick off new initiatives with no impact to core IT organizations within the business. For this reason, HCI deployments are seeing growth that enables business units to rapidly stand up new projects without impacting IT.

Did you know: 71% of technology decision makers use research-based thought leadership materials to vet a company’s capabilities?

I actually used to be one of those decision makers before recently joining ESG as a senior analyst, but before I get ahead of myself, let me step back and introduce myself.

When I look back, it seems like everything I have done in my career has led up to this moment. I have spent the past 25 years in the tech industry developing go-to-market strategies, identifying new routes to market, and creating and expanding partner ecosystems (three things we do in spades for our clients here at ESG).

A really common question this summer has been “What did you do during the pandemic?” Most would respond with projects around the house, maybe learned a new language, etc. However, If you attended the Nutanix .NEXT virtual conference, it would be pretty clear what the team at Nutanix was doing – innovating to deliver new capabilities for their customers. As the image below indicates, Nutanix announced a slew of innovative new solutions designed to enable organizations to Run Better, Run Faster, and Run Anywhere.

It would, surely, be a perfectly reasonable assumption that if you employ application developers, you’d like them to develop apps!? Indeed, if you are an application developer, one might assume the same thing applies!? Yet all too often these valuable individuals are constrained by the need to tinker with their IT infrastructure and environment in order to be able to do their Job #1 (or work with their IT colleagues on it….and/or moan…and/or escalate – but it all amounts to the same). While we’re talking assumptions, the uninitiated (hands up, I think that included me until I recently got set straight) could be tempted to think that app dev types are naturally drawn to such endeavors – whereas the truth is that they end up doing it, whether or not they like it, because they have to.