Disruptive IT infrastructure has been the norm over the decades, rather than the exception. Still, we have never seen a time such as now. The traditional hardware-defined datacenter model is besieged on multiple fronts. On one side is the public cloud, which continues to grow ever more popular. On the other side is software-defined infrastructure known as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which is also growing extremely rapidly. Seemingly sandwiched in the middle is the hybrid combination of software-defined infrastructure on-premises with multiple public cloud options – known as multi-cloud.

The goal of this book is to assist CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, IT managers, IT staff, channel partners, manufacturers, consultants, cloud providers, systems integrators, outsourcers, and anyone else interested in how to use financial analysis as a framework to optimize strategic decision-making. It is geared toward evaluating and building a corresponding business case for disruptive infrastructure technologies, and focuses on Nutanix’s HCI-based solution, what we call enterprise cloud, though the methodologies should prove helpful for analyzing any platform.