The case for open standards: an M&A perspective
Very few organizations use IT equipment supplied by a single vendor. Where heterogeneous IT environments exist, interoperability is key to achieving maximum value from existing investments. Open networking is the most cost effective way to ensure interoperability between devices on a network.
Unless your organization was formed very recently, chances are that your organization’s IT has evolved over time. Even small hardware upgrades are disruptive to an organization’s operations, making network-wide “lift and shift” upgrades nearly unheard of.
While loyalty to a single vendor can persist through regular organic growth and upgrade cycles, organizations regularly undergo mergers and acquisitions (M&As). M&As almost always introduce some level of heterogeneity into a network, meaning that any organization of modest size is almost guaranteed to have to integrate IT from multiple vendors.
While every new type of device from every different vendor imposes operational management overhead, the impact of heterogeneous IT isn’t universal across device types. The level of automation within an organization for different device classes, as well as the ubiquity and ease of use of management abstraction layers, both play a role in determining the impact of heterogeneity.
The Impact of Standards
Consider, for a moment, the average x86 server. Each Continue reading
