The Midsize Enterprise Summit 2016 kicked off in Austin on Sunday with a keynote presentation entitled, ‘Expand Your Possibilities, Not Your Data Center’, by Marty Sanders, Senior Vice President of the Americas for SimpliVity, a company that offers revolutionary and disruptive innovation designed to simplify the data center.
Sanders told those IT leaders assembled most data centers need to be greatly simplified and capabilities greatly enhanced on many levels. He believes the problem is that many companies are essentially stuck following outdated IT management patterns simply because they worked in the past (for example, making continuous investment in complex and costly data center infrastructure that uses inefficient methods of storing and processing data in functional silos).
“IT is often misaligned with business needs today is because too many IT teams are spending too much time and resources on ‘run’ activities rather than on ‘transform’ initiatives that truly enable a business to move forward and be more competitive,” said Sanders, who oversees all sales and go-to-market activities in North and South America for SimpliVity .
Sanders cited recent Deutsche Bank market research that found chief information officers are looking to cut back on areas of IT spending that are viewed as undifferentiated (such as infrastructure) to projects that are transformative in nature (such as digital innovation initiatives).
“It is time for companies to break old patterns and look at entirely new approaches to revolutionize the data center and realize significant savings in capital and operational costs as a result,” he said.
Another reason to make a change is the critical importance of disaster recovery. Sanders talked about the recent negative press for Delta Airlines after a simple power outage brought Delta’s operations to a stand-still for more than one day in early August. Sanders said that Delta’s CIO had probably felt confident in the airline’s disaster recovery plan prior to that incident, which had a huge cost in terms of lost revenue, compensation for customers, and long-term brand damage.
Sanders cautioned the audience how many companies don’t know if they have an effective DR strategy until they need it. He then gave example of a SimpliVity customer that was able to effectively manage a potentially crippling CryptoLocker and Ransomware attack within 10 minutes of occurrence, simply by using SimpliVity’s smart phone app while the IT director was enjoying a weekend road trip with his family.
Beyond the DR capabilities, Sanders told the audience that today’s forward IT and business leaders are looking companies are also looking for operational and capital savings that can be redeployed to more transformative activities.
SimpliVity offers a revolutionary and disruptive innovation designed to simplify and deliver big savings in capital and operational costs by moving from a running environment to a transformative environment. Making such dramatic change isn’t always easy, but Sanders said SimpliVity has extensive experience and numerous client success stories to prove its success. Sanders noted that some clients have achieved as much as a 73 percent savings and have been able to recoup their investment cost for a new data center in less than seven months.
“Now those companies are spending the vast majority of their time on new innovation projects rather than IT maintenance, allowing them to be more competitive.” Bottom line, Sanders told the MES audience that it is imperative for today’s CIO to be able to digitally transform the data center to stay competitive.
“We are the only hyperconverged company in the market today that has data protection and disaster recovery built into our offering,” said Sanders, who also showed recently analyst research that confirmed the same.
The company says midmarket represents the majority of its customer base today. “Mid-market is our bread and butter and we know they have limited time and less money than large enterprises, he said.
Among his closing remarks, Sanders briefly reviewed several client success stories involving significant data center transformation driven by SimpliVity, including a global financial services firm based in the U.S. that was able to achieve a 90 percent reduction in floor space and cooling as well as seamless VM mobility between three global data centers. Sanders said the firm has a projected $100 million cost savings over five years.
Janice Cain, MBA, is an award-winning Marketing Consultant and PR Advisor who has been working extensively in the IT industry for more than 10 years with some of the world’s best known software and hardware companies. Follow her @1010_Marketing
