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How can Converged Infrastructure compete with World Cup Football?
After a brisk 7,000 mile trek (as the crow flies) to Brazil, I was greeted with incredible enthusiasm as a speaker at the Ciab FEBRABAN. Maybe not a familiar name to most, but now with their 20th edition in full swing, this event has established itself as one of the biggest in the financial world and certainly the largest in Latin America (the main exhibition of banking technology for the financial sector).
Converged Infrastructure may have been my topic, but I was trumped by the impending World Cup. Can Brazil do it again? Or, maybe a better question is – can I sway the attention away from this historic question and back to my presentation? No hope, so I decided instead to embrace it ... and use it as my ‘ace-in-the-hole’ ice breaker. You see, there ARE many similarities between world-class Football and Converged Infrastructure. Both deliver extreme agility and both need to provision pressure packed workloads to the right spot and at the right time if the ‘enterprises’ goals are to be met.
Seriously, ‘agility’ is as much a keyword for CIOs down here as it is for the sport they dominate. But when talking to leaders in the financial services arena, there is no way of getting around the fact that agility must also be affordable and safe. They want agility to enable growth, but do so with proven optimization solutions that drive down costs, drive productivity gains from their employees, and do so in a very safe and secure manner. Interestingly, several CIOs talked about the importance of IT agility for enhancing their company brand. Of course I was just itching to tell them how the HP Converged Infrastructure makes this attainable today. Don’t worry, I won’t hype my personal “feel good CI story”, rather, let me leave you with a few of the “top-of-mind” takeaways that I heard from these leaders:
- Applying infrastructure virtualization (NOT just servers) is very important
- Security and compliance is hot
- Of course, Private Cloud conversations are everywhere (GO Matrix)
- Investment protection was also critical. One CIO even said the coexistence of mainframes with these new alternatives was important. What a door opener for me to talk about the new Superdome 2.
- And what they liked most about the HP Converged Infrastructure is the ability to unlock greater employee productivity by being able to “stand up” new apps & services MUCH faster. Thus, this translated into helping them contribute to business revenue growth.
It’s always a great experience to talk with CIOs and IT experts – I learn something new every time.
Obrigado,
Duncan





