By Drew Denkhaus
I was recently watching a television program called, “The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation” and took particular interest in a segment on hydroponic farming. A company in Jackson, WY, called Vertical Harvest has innovated its entire greenhouse from top to bottom—and to me, it strikingly resembles what many of our customers are looking to do with their IT Infrastructure.
The folks at Vertical Harvest are leveraging a hybrid model greenhouse that provides year-round produce with no fallow period. Hydroponic farming uses water instead of soil to deliver nutrients to plants. The 3,500 sq. ft., three-story facility grows the same amount of produce as a traditional, five acre farm—all on just a tenth of an acre. This circulating hydroponic growing system saves on land, water, pesticides and runoff while providing locally grown produce all year round. With this innovation, Vertical Harvest will yield 100,000 lbs. of crops annually and will be able to deliver their crops to local grocers and restaurants within a day of harvest.
So, what does this have to do with IT infrastructure? Well, our enterprise customers also are looking to innovate—to do more with less, to best serve their customers and to produce the best offerings in the market.
For businesses to be agile and competitive, IT teams need to transform the infrastructure to better support the business. Just like with this innovative greenhouse, our enterprise customers are looking for ways to automate and orchestrate their daily activities to provide a more fluid, self-service approach. Such an approach in turn will expedite processes and provide the necessary compute resources to the business in seconds and minutes instead of days and weeks.
Traditional greenhouses resemble our customers’ traditional IT environments where silos of compute and storage remain static and limit utilization from other areas of business and workloads. By taking advantage of the hybrid capabilities available today, IT can meet the business needs at cloud-like speeds. To keep up with the business demands and to remain in control of where applications and data reside, IT needs to be a services broker.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and PwC understand customers are looking at multiple cloud environments in order to meet business needs, and IT requires a hybrid approach to manage it holistically.
The absolute number one thing we hear from analysts and customers that are looking at transformation, is not about features and capabilities, but centered on trust and guidance. Customers are looking for a strong partnership like the one HPE and PwC have shared for nearly 40 years. We both have a proven track record as trusted advisors, HPE with the infrastructure, software and solutions and PwC with the strategy, structure, people and processes. Working together, HPE and PwC combine all aspects needed to help customers transform the business and the IT infrastructure to support it.
To learn more about the culture split in IT infrastructure, the impact on the idea economy and about the HPE and PwC partnership please join our breakout session BB8017 Schizophrenic IT infrastructure; impacts of the idea economy during HPE Discover 2016 in Las Vegas on June 7th at 9:30 a.m. and stop by PwC booth 201. Also, contact us at pwcalliance@hpe.com and visit us at www.hpe.com/partners/pwc. We’re committed to helping you cultivate your greatest growth potential. “Lettuce” tell you more!
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