Hyperconverged platform market to shoot up says analyst

The global hyperconverged platforms market will enjoy a 50 percent compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2020, reaching $1.6 billion in revenue, according to analyst Technology Business Research (TBR).

“Modern business transformation goes nowhere without agile, scalable infrastructure,” said TBR analyst Christian Perry. “Aging, complex IT environments are giving way to new breeds of infrastructure designed to ease deployment and management. Hyperconverged is leading this charge with ferocity.”

He says the hyperconverged platforms market is “teeming with competition” from pure plays like Nutanix, SimpliVity, Pivot3 and Gridstore; and OEMs like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco. However, as the displacement of legacy storage technologies continues, the competitive dynamic between these two camps is growing more complex, he says, particularly as hardware OEMs seek to protect their legacy install bases.

Hardware OEMs and niche hyperconverged vendors are partnering to efficiently and cost-effectively offer appliances and maximise flexibility for customers. For example, Nutanix partnered with Brocade in January.

“As adoption of hyperconverged grows quickly in IT organisations of all sizes, vendors are seeking to meet customer demand for decreased complexity and more effective management, especially in areas with heavy storage requirements,” said fellow TBR analyst Krista Macomber. “Customers’ storage challenges provide opportunities for hyperconverged platforms vendors, since many hyperconverged platforms are built with a focus on improved performance and management of storage-heavy workloads.

“In turn, hardware OEMs continue to invest in hyperconverged systems to offset declining revenue in legacy infrastructure businesses.”

TBR said vendors are investing to sustain their differentiation in key areas customers value, such as cost, scalability and flexibility. And TBR believes hyperconverged solutions will account for a larger share of the overall converged infrastructure market, increasing from nearly 7 percent in 2015 to 32 percent in 2020, according to TBR’s 1Q16 Hyperconverged Platforms Market Landscape report.

It said OEMs will invest heavily in portfolio development and use “aggressive pricing strategies” to differentiate and grow their overall hyperconverged market share. The hyperconverged platforms market will also see a rapid increase in alliances and acquisitions, as major OEMs seek to establish leadership by partnering with niche and emerging vendors.

TBR’s Hyperconverged Platforms Market Landscape includes research on Atlantis, Cisco, DataCore, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Gridstore, HDS, HPE, Huawei, Lenovo, Maxta, NetApp, Nimboxx, Nutanix, Pivot3, Riverbed, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, StorMagic, VMware and Yottabyte.

@AntonySavvas