As enterprise IT chiefs grow increasingly frustrated with the constant updating, integrating and reconfiguring of software and hardware that consumes their teams, more vendors are building systems that come integrated and optimized for the customer. The trend means that CIOs and their IT teams will be able to spend less time on the busywork of managing, updating and testing systems, and more time on projects that bring business value, writes InformationWeek's Bob Evans.

Numerous vendors are offering specialized appliances that don't require so much time and effort on the part of the customer, including IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), Netezza, Teradata, and now Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Evans writes. Microsoft's recently announced Azure platform appliance is installed in a private cloud on the customer site, bringing features similar to those in the Azure public cloud but with greater privacy and security.

Evans predicts that the rise of this type of specialized appliance will gain a serious foothold in the industry. For one thing, CIOs are just about fed up with the amount of resources required to manage traditional systems. For another, the list of vendors that are leading the trend have a history of responding when customers demand it: "[T]heir track record for spotting new ideas might not be perfect, but when all of them move very quickly and aggressively into a new space, it's probably because customers' screams for help have become impossible to ignore," he writes.

For more:
- see Bob Evans' post at InformationWeek

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