Engineered Systems Help Simplify IT, Power Innovation Date:   Tuesday , December 15, 2015 With the IT environments getting more complex, the technology infrastructure market is undergoing a shift towards integrated systems. In addition to the growing need for simplifying IT complexity, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and enhanced security are factors driving this trend. Single-stack solutions like Oracle\'s Engineered Systems are expected to be an overriding trend for the IT industry in 2015. According to IDC there are two market segments for integrated systems – Integrated Infrastructure and Integrated platforms. Integrated infrastructure is the bundling together of hardware by multiple vendors. These players are trying to solve the complexity of hardware by combining storage, servers, network etc. into one unit. Examples include VCE, a joint venture between EMC, Cisco and VMware, which produces the Vblock solutions and the Cisco and NetApp product called the FlexPod. Integrated platforms like Oracle\'s engineered systems on the other hand combine hardware and software for a targeted functionality whether it is to manage big data, power cloud or consolidate databases. Enterprises are realizing that consolidating workloads from multiple machines onto a single, engineered system works faster; is less expensive and just makes good business sense. When they compare price/ performance numbers with multivendor solutions – solutions that they have to buy, build, integrate, and test on their own – it\'s evident that engineered systems offer lower TCO and better performance, business results and RoI. Older platforms that combine discrete hardware and software technologies also face scalability and reliability challenges when running customized, dynamic business processes, particularly in the face of disruptive trends such as cloud computing and mobile technology. These platforms are often heavily customized, so over time they become difficult to support and upgrade. Traditional application platforms also leave IT managers wrestling with utilization and management issues caused by too many application instances running in myriad data centres, makes it difficult to satisfy IT mandates to cut infrastructure costs and complexity. Faster time to production is achieved by implementing pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. Single-vendor stack also simplifies and reduces the costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments. The market dynamics are also playing a role. Enterprises are overcoming perceived barriers to integrated systems, including premium pricing, a preference for self-integration and less vendor lock-in. Additionally, rapid technology transformation is leading to altered and dynamic client engagement, which in turn is fuelling business transfiguration, speeding up delivery services, and driving innovation capabilities across practices and operations. For businesses, investment in innovation drives progress. In today\'s fast-moving economy, the seemingly endless trickle of money companies will spend to tune and manage their data centers would serve them better if reinvested towards achieving measurable market growth. Fully-integrated hardware and application-aware systems, give businesses the self-managing IT solution they need to reduce their long-term IT investment and focus on achieving success in their respective fields. Furthermore, due to the dynamic relationship between application and software within these stacks, businesses will also benefit from dramatically improved data processing capability and speed. Successful deployments by some of the leading companies are evidence to the value proposition of single stack solution. For example Reliance Commercial Finance experienced 30 percent faster loan transaction speed and staff productivity improvement by 70 percent by making a transition to cloud using Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. HDFC Securities gained 3x throughput performance and can now execute online trades up to 60 percent faster, and cut data centre costs with Oracle Sparc Super Cluster. Accelya Kale, a software firm dealing with the airline industry was able to process more than 100 million transactions in a year that is 2.5 times faster and is able to do 99 percent accurate business reporting using Oracle Exadata Database machine. According to a Forrester study commissioned by Oracle and Intel, an organization which deployed Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic together saved $305,000 in three years by eliminating hardware and maintenance. The deployments help reduce downtime by 16 hours per year. This translates into $1.85 million per year in revenue protection. The company saw a large improvement in terms of transactions processed while reducing latency and peak loads. For example, application load times decreased by 60 percent and database access times decreased more than 70 percent. Enterprise software forms the backbone of many businesses today and they require enormous funding to keep them running or to be maintained – almost 80 percent of IT budget is spent on this maintenance while 20 percent is left for innovation or customer-facing initiatives. By moving far beyond the traditional approach, engineered systems help companies attack this IT-infrastructure sprawl so companies can focus on innovation and new business initiatives.