Converged IT infrastructure is the best bet for enterprises looking to achieve capacity flexibility while reducing costs and speeding up their return on investment (ROI), according to a new market survey from International Data Corp.

The Converged IT infrastructure survey was sponsored by VCE, the spin-off company created by Cisco Systems Ltd. and EMC Corp. According to IDC, enterprises that adopt converged infrastructures witness a 36 percent decrease in operating costs, on average. They also reported a whopping 96 percent reduction in IT downtime, as well as faster application deployment, Enterprise Tech reported.

IDC did admit the efficiencies delivered by converged infrastructure come at a cost, but said the trade-off was almost always worthwhile: “While converged infrastructure has some issues in terms of capital and increased training, these are minor compared to the benefits and longer-term investments that it delivers,” the report concluded.

The analyst firm also thinks that enterprises feel the same way. According to the study, IT departments will spend $14.3 billion on converged infrastructure by 2018, a 27 percent increase from the $10 billion they’ll spend this year.

IDC says the trend among data centers for cloud-based platforms that integrate Big Data analytics is the main factor driving this shift to converged infrastructures. Such infrastructure has been dubbed “The 3rd Platform” by IDC, and is ideal for companies that place a high value on speed and agility. “No longer can business unites wait weeks or months for the infrastructure required to deploy or scale new applications or services,” the report said. “They require the flexibility to quickly scale their compute capacity up or down for any particular application to respond to changing use cases and patterns of demand.”

It’s worth noting that IDC’s findings come with a caveat; the VCE-sponsored study was entirely based on interviews with 16 enterprises who’ve deployed VCE’s Vblock virtualization and cloud-computing systems that integrate Cisco’s compute and networking, EMC’s storage and VMware’s virtualization software. Nevertheless, IDC says the 16 organizations it quizzed earn an average of $6.20 for every dollar spend on Vblock. For example, customers saw a reduction of 67 percent in networking costs after switching to converged infrastructure.

Cost savings aren’t the only benefit though. The study also concludes that converged infrastructure boosts overall productivity within organizations by reducing the amount of time IT teams must spend to keep things ticking over smoothly.

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