On average, more than 70% of IT budgets are spent on operations and maintenance. Two-thirds of companies go over schedule on their project deployments.  

These staggering stats need to improve.

Ways to improve on these organizational inefficiencies are to combine the flexibility of general-purpose systems, the elasticity of cloud and the simplicity of an appliance tuned to the workload into expert integrated systems.

Expert integrated systems are more than a stack of pre-integrated components - a server here, some database software there, serving a fixed application at the top. Instead, these integrated systems are based on “patterns of expertise,” which can dramatically improve upon the responsiveness of the business.

This paper details two types of integrated systems - platform and infrastructure, and the benefits of each, such as agility, efficiency, simplicity and control.