Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

For years, SAP leaders have been told a familiar story: Scale carefully. Don’t outgrow your infrastructure. Hope your next acquisition fits inside your existing SAP footprint. Behind the scenes, many SAP teams have been managing risk not by innovating, but by working around the limits of their storage platforms. CIOs, for example, are increasingly prioritizing platform consolidation, with 75% of organizations pursuing vendor consolidation as fragmented, aging architectures become harder to manage.

In an always-on industrial economy, fragmented data is a liability. Your analytics reports may look flawless, but if they’re built on data silos scattered across edge, core, and cloud, they’re built on a fault line. Data silos drive-up costs, distort the critical decisions meant to drive competition, and prevent organizations from reaching a state of data singularity — where data becomes unified, portable, and continuously usable for AI.

Most enterprises have made the commitment to AI. They’ve approved the budgets, stood up the pilots, and named it a strategic priority. So why are 95% of them getting zero return on $30–40 billion in GenAI investment? According to MIT research cited in Hitachi Vantara’s 2025 State of Data Infrastructure Global Report — which surveyed more than 1,200 IT leaders across 15 markets — the failure isn’t the model. It’s the infrastructure underneath it.

As organizations scale their AI initiatives from experimentation into production, CTOs face a pivotal architectural challenge as storage emerges as one of the most common—and most expensive—constraints. While organizations continue to invest aggressively in GPU compute, studies consistently show that infrastructure inefficiencies outside the GPU account for the majority of wasted AI spend.

Enterprises in 2026 are under increasing pressure to modernize applications, adopt hybrid cloud architectures, and streamline operations—but their expanding and aging VMware footprints have become a major obstacle. As VMware licensing models evolve and operational costs climb, reducing or restructuring this footprint has become just as critical as adopting new platforms.