For any business to thrive in today’s economy, some sort of digital transformation strategy is essential. After all, how else will you create value and achieve competitive advantage without new products, improved customer experiences and increased operational efficiencies?

At the heart of nearly every digital transformation exercise is next-generation applications and technologies, which will soon coexist with traditional solutions. IT departments must manage an infrastructure ‘duality’, each with extremely diverse requirements and objectives.

This also calls for a change in datacentre infrastructure and operations. IDC recently found that implementing next-generation apps on infrastructure designed for traditional solutions could put digital transformation initiatives in jeopardy.

One way to avoid this scenario is to adopt a composable infrastructure.

Current infrastructure adoption and usage trends

To quantity current infrastructure adoption and usage trends, IDC and Hewlett Packard surveyed 301 IT users from medium-sized and large enterprises. The study found that:

  • Median people efficiency in enterprise IT is 55% – This can be attributed to how people spend their time on routine operations tasks.
  • Median process efficiency in enterprise IT is 30% – This is mostly due to the number of steps needed to complete provisioning tasks and the lack of automation.
  • Median technology efficiency in enterprise IT is 50% – This is due to a combination of overprovisioning for redundancy and resiliency and ongoing underutilisation from a capacity and performance perspective.

It’s clear from these results that people, process and technology efficiency is severely lacking for many in enterprise in IT.  So what’s the solution?

How composable infrastructure can bridge gaps in efficiency

Composable infrastructure solutions such as HPE Synergy have been designed to help businesses that currently run traditional solutions but are rapidly transitioning to next-generation applications. Essentially, its the best of both worlds –  for applications with infrastructure resiliency requirements and for applications that don’t assume infrastructure resiliency.

Key foundation design elements of composable infrastructure, which includes HPE Synergy, are:

  • Unified APIs – This enables developers to integrate infrastructure provisioning commands directly into the application development process, which in turn allows for a quicker deployment of applications.
  • Software-defined intelligence – This minimises hiccups caused by operational activities such as operating system patching and firmware upgrades, thereby improving IT efficiency and reducing opex.
  • Fluid resource pools – This reduces the wastage and overhead caused by overprovisioning of resources and thus provides a means to capex.

Digital transformation and next-generation applications will only fuel the demand for composable infrastructure, which promises to create greater business agility, lower operational costs, and increased application performance.