Build your own vs Converged infrastructure vs Hyper-converged infrastructure

Build your own (BYO) infrastructure is where you take separate compute, storage, networking, virtualisation software from several vendors with separate support contracts and then create your own private cloud based on this infrastructure model and hope that everything works as expected. 

Here are some definitions: 

Converged infrastructure (CI):

Converged infrastructure (CI) is an approach to data center management that relies on a specific vendor and the vendor’s partners to provide pre-configured bundles of hardware and software in a single chassis.

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI):

Hyper-convergence (hyperconvergence) is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. 

A comparison of build your own to converged infrastructure is akin to kit cars vs. Formula One race cars, to illustrate the difference between build-your-own vs Pre-integrated stacks. 

Converged infrastructure can be a very attractive proposition: all support matrix issues are much simpler as converged infrastructure comes as one single unit with single line of support. 

Gartner Converged Infrastructure Magic Quadrant:

Leader is VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) with their VBlock offering:

Yet Converged infrastructure still needs to be reasonably competitive on price with public cloud or  BYO cloud. Converged infrastructure is portrayed as a high end infrastructure, yet the reality is that components are mid range at best. Vendors love the profit margins and proprietary lock-in of these products.

I like public cloud as it provides easy to use building blocks for infrastructure and makes it very easy to automate as everything is an API call. No more service requests to many different teams which takes a long time. With public cloud and wealth of hundreds of service, it gives businesses opportunity to deploy solutions far faster than with traditional infrastructure hence saving on the most expensive resource...people. With Moore's law and open source software infrastructure costs are rapidly declining and the real costs are the large teams of expensive resources required to run manual Enterprise IT. Even converged infrastructure is still too slow, complex and lacking services compared to big public clouds such as a AWS.