The innovation imperative

Perhaps more than at any time in history, private and public sector organizations face intense pressure to innovate faster. While this “innovation imperative” is produced by a host of factors, increased globalization and heightened customer or citizen expectations are most responsible for keeping executives up at night.

In addition, digital technology advances now enable new market entrants to threaten—and overtake—incumbents that fail to answer the innovation challenge. Recent history provides many examples of market leaders that suffered the dire consequences of failing to foresee the shift to “digital” business models (Kodak and Blockbuster come immediately to mind). The stakes are high—it is estimated that by 2027, new firms will replace 75 percent of the companies that were in the S&P 500 Index in 2011.1 A significant part of this competitive turnover will result from technology-driven market disruption.

The increased demands for faster innovation, more globalization, and better customer experiences have a downstream impact on operational complexity, leaving many companies to face critically important questions such as:

• How do we continually optimize our development and manufacturing processes to support faster innovation cycles?
• How do we meet rising demands from technology-savvy customers who expect flawless service?
• How do we manage a complex, expanding portfolio of physical assets that are distributed across the globe?
• How do we effectively manage our growing ecosystem of supply-chain partners? To address these and other challenges, organizations are increasingly looking to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Total Economic Impact of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure

Implementing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) delivered several benefits:

• Reduced IT effort—implementation and ongoing operations
• Data center build out time and effort reduced by more than 50%
• Ongoing administration effort cut by 35%
• Lowered hardware cost—initial data center buildout and supporting growth
• Hardware costs reduced by 20%
• Improved user productivity from better uptime and system performance
• Four fewer hours of application/data center downtime which impact all 10,000 employees

The Business Value of Cisco UCS as a Platform for SAP HANA and Other SAP Mission-Critical Applications

IDC finds that leveraging data analytics in business decisions is becoming a top priority for an increasing number of companies. This in turn is placing new demands on IT organizations; the need is twofold: to manage new streams of unstructured data from sources such as social media and to speed response times to deliver real-time analytics.

As analytic and business application systems grow ever more sophisticated, and their operational platform requirements become more complex, enterprise IT is turning to integrated systems to reduce the complexity, risk, and cost of managing data center infrastructure for such applications. Cisco has been a market leader in integrated systems since the introduction of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) more than five years ago.

SAP has responded to the demand for data analytics by developing SAP HANA, a comprehensive in-memory database software system that is delivered on platforms built to SAP specifications by select system partners.

SAP applications are cornerstones of many organizations’ business operations.