The many responsibilities of the CIO include determining if the company’s software needs are best served by an off-the-shelf solution, a customizable product that can be tailored to the organization’s use case, or an internally developed application. According to The 1610 Group founder and managing consultant Scott Lowe, the rapid pace of innovation is forcing a growing number of CIOs to decide between buying and building in a new context: hardware.

In Lowe’s view, developing applications from scratch is analogous to “[piecing] together the entire data center component by component” and performing compatibility and interoperability testing in-house. At the other end of the spectrum lies pure cloud infrastructure, the hardware equivalent of off-the-shelf software. Lowe writes that most enterprises are situated somewhere in between at one of three “waypoints”:

• “Prebuilt, prevalidated infrastructure, such as VCE Vblock. These are a “buy” solution, but still require local hands to manage.
• Hyperconverged infrastructure such as that from Nutanix and Simplivity. This on-premises gear is much closer to the “buy” side of the house as it requires a bit less hands on IT time.
• Hybrid cloud environments in which organizations enjoy a seamless combination of on-premises and cloud based environments. The on-premises side of these environments can be legacy gear or converged or hyperconverged equipment.”

Lowe views the latter as the most flexible option of the three. He predicts that this model will continue to gain traction as a growing number of enterprises migrate their workloads to the cloud.

Emerging hardware trends are “shifting the build vs. buy discussion well into the realm of data center hardware.” Lowe views this transition as a new opportunity for CIOs to establish a balance between IT projects and business needs.