By Tom Frana, Chairman and CEO, ViON Corporation
Nimble, fast-moving companies have been the heartbeat of American innovation and entrepreneurialism since the dawn of our nation. The fact that our lives are driven by (increasingly cloud-based) digital infrastructures hasn’t changed the dynamic of innovation by agile companies that can quickly get to market with something new. Another aspect of innovation and entrepreneurialism that has not changed over time is: Big companies that are more conservative about innovation will look to what’s succeeding in the market before leaping in, patiently allowing customer response to provide a gauge regarding what’s working and what’s not. These big companies will join in just as often through acquisition of a new idea as through true invention and product development.
We are seeing this same pattern now in IT Modernization with Everything as-a-Service. The movement of IT infrastructure from costly, on-prem solutions to consumption-driven, as-a-Service, hosted multicloud environments couldn’t be clearer. It has gained momentum for myriad reasons, as has been widely written up in an equally wide range of publications: cost savings, dependability, lower (or no) required CapEx … the list of benefits could go on for pages. And now, some of the larger companies have looked at the success that leading IT companies like ViON have been experiencing with their “Everything as-a-Service” offering and declared that they’ll blaze a “new path of innovation” to offer the same. In fact, HPE is targeting a 2022 rollout of what we’ve been deploying in the market for over a decade (see this recent story).
The lesson here, of course, is that Everything as-a-Service has truly arrived because customers desire it! We are pleased that the market is beginning to offer what customers have been asking for, and we are grateful to our customers for trusting us with solving their biggest challenges via IT as-a-Service. It is because of this “customer-first” mentality and our longstanding relationships across the market that we’ve been able to be early innovators. And while our customers have already been enjoying Everything as-a-Service, we’ve been working on our next innovation – ViON Enterprise Cloud (VEC). VEC can help customers with one of the most difficult challenges – what goes into the Cloud and which Cloud provides the best environment for my applications to ensure high performance.
Over my three decades in the IT industry, there’s one thing I’ve learned is always certain: competition drives innovation and the customer always wins – and that’s what matters most.