Increasing Customer Expectations, Digital Transformation Initiatives and Data Security Requirements Drive Industry-wide Innovation and Increased Need for Hybrid Cloud
New York City – January 14, 2019 – Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the retail findings of its Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring retailers’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. The report revealed enterprise workloads are quickly moving off traditional data center infrastructure, dropping from 41% today to just 18% in two years time, as cloud usage accelerates. The retail industry has the second largest penetration of hybrid cloud deployments at 21%; with 93% identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, outpacing the global average for other industries.
Today’s consumer expects a seamless omnichannel shopping experience in store, online and through new avenues such as mobile, in-app or even smart TV purchases. At the same time, retailers need to gather, analyze and keep data secure. This pressure to keep ahead of customer expectations is driving retailers to deploy innovative IT practices faster than ever.
It may not be a surprise that retailers are also embracing public clouds more quickly than their counterparts in other industries, yet their control of public cloud spend is better than peers in other industries. With the seasonality of the retail industry and traffic bursts impacting workload needs throughout the year, retailers have experience in flexing workloads to the public cloud as demand requires. Today, there is 15% public cloud usage in the retail industry compared to a 12% global average; and usage is set to grow to 22% in the next two years, outpacing the global cross-industry average by an even wider margin of 7 percent. Yet the higher than average percentage of retailers who say that hybrid cloud is the ideal IT deployment model (93%) also indicates that public cloud is not a panacea for the retail industry.
Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey more than 2,300 IT decision makers including 329 worldwide retailers about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud challenges are and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities. The survey included respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.
The bullish outlook for hybrid cloud adoption globally and across industries is reflective of an IT landscape growing increasingly automated and flexible enough that enterprises have the choice to buy, build, or rent their IT infrastructure resources based on application requirements. For retailers, having the flexibility to choose the right cloud for each application appeared most often as the benefit for deploying hybrid cloud (at 18%) followed closely by using cloud “on the fly” to support periods of high traffic loads. Given the seasonality of business and variance of IT and network consumption needs throughout the year, retailers understand the need to keep IT flexible.
Other key findings of the report include:
- Retailers control cloud spend better. One motivation for deploying hybrid clouds is enterprises’ need to get more control over their IT spend – with 35% of organizations using public clouds saying they overspent on their public cloud services budgets. Retail companies, perhaps due to experience, seem to be doing a better job of managing their public cloud expenses. About 69% of retail companies said their public cloud spend was under or on budget, and just 29% reported being over budget, compared to 35% of cross-industry global companies.
- IT talent and security are barriers to hybrid cloud adoption, but cost also tops the list: Globally, more than half of survey respondents said that data security/compliance, performance, management, and TCO are critical factors in deciding where to put their application workloads. While 88% of global respondents expect hybrid cloud will positively impact their business, hybrid cloud skills ranked second in scarcity for retailers (30%), with the leading shortage going to artificial intelligence and machine learning skills. A huge emphasis for retailers compared to other industries was cost – with nearly 20% citing this as a top criterion.
“More than many industries, retailers are acutely aware of how IT strategy and execution directly impact the customer experience and the bottom line. The high adoption and planned growth of hybrid cloud in retail show that retailers understand that hybrid is the best solution for keeping up with customer demands while keeping flexibility, security and costs in line,” said Chris Kozup, senior vice president of Global Marketing at Nutanix. “I expect the retail industry to keep its lead in IT innovation as they form new strategies to delight their customers in the retail experience.”
To learn more about the global report and findings, please download the “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index 2018,” here.
Nutanix at NRF
To meet up with Nutanix at NRF 2019, stop by booth #1530 or schedule a one-on-one briefing with an executive or product leader by emailing ebc@nutanix.com. Nutanix is also planning a special evening event for insiders. Send a note to events@nutanix.com if you’d like an exclusive invitation.
Visitors to the booth will learn about Nutanix remote office solutions for store locations, multi-cloud management capabilities for streamlined IT operations, and IoT platform for next generation customer experiences and data analysis. For each presentation or demo, visitors will also earn shopping credits toward giveaways in the booth store.
For more information:
- Learn more about Nutanix solutions for the retail industry on our website
- Read about the transformative power of Nutanix for retail here
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making infrastructure invisible so that IT can focus on the applications and services that power their business. Companies around the world use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to bring one-click application management and mobility across public, private and distributed edge clouds so they can run any application at any scale with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. The result is organizations that can rapidly deliver a high-performance IT environment on demand, giving application owners a true cloud-like experience. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.
© 2019 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc., in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).