Beingfastis important this time of year.

X-Wing Fighters in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" are fast.

Avoiding that overly excited light saber wielding fan in line requires you to be fast.

Holiday shoppers are snatching up deals fast.

Retailers with transaction spikes need to add infrastructure capacity fast.

Your customers want their IT Infrastructure services fast...and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) helps deliver that speed.

This IDC report shows how Pulsant -a UK based IT Infrastructure Services Provider -delivers services fast with ACI. It also quantifies the returns on that speed and other benefits. In some ways, their story is like that of many customers -they need to deliver IT services faster, they need to do more with less...you know the drill. And if you are using ACI, you also know how to address those issues. If not, take a couple minutes and check out the report. In it, Martin Lipka, Head of Connectivity Architecture at Pulsant, addresses a number of interesting issues and IDC helps to quantify them. Check out how Pulsant is:

• Onboarding customers faster with the "simplified automation" ACI provides
• Growing its customer base without needing to add a commensurate number of network engineers
• Reducing the frequency of misconfigurations and improving the security of its services

In the report, Martin explains how "automation and repeatable processes enabled by Cisco ACI have benefited his company byreducing the timeneeded to provision network resources andspeeding updeployment cycles." For example, "Pulsant needed an average of 7-14 days before moving to Cisco ACI to deliver a bespoke cloud service to a customer, whereas it now needs only 2-3 days." At the back end, when those services are no longer needed, "the network process of decommissioning a customer and cleansing the configuration has gonefrom taking hours to secondsthanks to Cisco ACI's built-in automation."

ACI helps Pulsant deliver services fast. ACI also delivered a return fast -ROI analysis showed apaybackperiod ofunder 7 months.

In summary, if you are looking to deploy services fast, tear them down fast, get a return fast -check out the report and check out ACI.

And, oh yeah, as a public safety message, please let's not swing those light sabers too fast tonight. May the force be with you...

Photo courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org