Gartner has named HPE, EMC and Nutanix as leaders in hyperconverged integrated systems in its 2016 Magic Quadrant report.
Gartner defines integrated systems as “combinations of server, storage and network infrastructure, sold with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the combined unit”.
The industry analyst estimated that 30 percent of the global data centre storage array capacity will be deployed on software-defined storage or hyperconverged integrated systems architectures by 2019, an increase of more than 25 percent on today.
HPE, EMC and Nutanix led the 'Leader' quadrant, where they were joined by Simplivity, Oracle, Cisco and NetApp. Gartner's integrated systems report is getting busy, with another 12 vendors spread across the Visionaries, Challengers and Niche Players quadrants.
HPE was commended for having broadened its portfolio and strengthened its channel and partner relationships. It was singled out as being able to offer convergence to cloud “with single contract support and accountability, factory integration, and pay-per-use options”.
Concerns raised by the report included HPE being a late starter in the hyperconverged space and the technical and marketing challenges it faced to consolidate increasingly complex portfolios.
The report ranked EMC as a separate company, having merged with Dell this year. It is the parent company of VCE, which was the first entrant into the converged market through a partnership between VMware, Cisco and EMC. VCE was absorbed back into EMC this year.
The report posited that: “EMC is poised to continue its success if the obvious and significant product overlaps with Dell's even larger integrated system portfolio can be speedily resolved and new roadmaps articulated as quickly as possible after the Dell-EMC merger completes”.
Though the report did note concerns of uncertainty as the new Dell-EMC-VMware merger brings overlapping and competing integrated system strategies under one roof.
Nutanix was also ranked high, with the report stating that “aggressive product development and execution resulted in strong sales growth and larger overall deal sizes across top global enterprise accounts”.
The report did caution that Nutanix would find it increasingly difficulty to maintain a price premium against other HCIS vendors as more rivals moved into the space.
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