London/Amsterdam, July 19, 2013 – A joint study by IT research firms ITCandor and The METISfiles finds that the Converged Infrastructure and Integrated Systems (CI and IS) market in EMEA was worth $2.6B in 2012 and will grow at 18% CAGR to reach $5.5B in 2018.
CI and IS approaches include new ways of selling, extensions of blade system strategies, adoption of Software Defined Data Centres (SDDC), new fabric designs, advanced virtualisation and/or a means for helping customers deploy applications faster through automation and smart systems management tools. Most of today’s offerings fall into the lowest of 5 layers, but more sophisticated offerings will see the scope expand upwards over time.
The research culminates into a snapshot overview of the current competitive landscape for CI and IS vendors in EMEA (see Figure above). The four largest competitors include HP, which has built its data centre strategy on its own industry standard offerings and has the widest channel partner choice. IBM, which launched PureSystems in April 2012 and has been particularly successful in selling its Flex Systems to MSPs and in launching a number of workload-optimised systems using its own applications. EMC, which is a major player through its ownership of VMware, which is used for virtualisation in the vast majority of systems shipped by all vendors to date. Cisco, which has a full set of offerings and partnerships, having launched UCS in 2008 and partnering strongly with VMware and parent EMC for vBlock and with NetApp for FlexPod. Of the other competitors Dell is best positioned to move towards the top right of the chart due to its strong data centre revenues, a clearly thought-out strategy and strong sales team.
Users rate lower total cost of ownership (32%) as the biggest advantage of CI and IS followed by greater agility in meeting the objects set by line of business (23%) and the reduction of manual intervention in managing systems (20%).
‘Vendors must do more to meet clear user requirements for simplification and speedier application deployment’, says Pim Bilderbeek, METISfiles partner and principal analyst.
‘Suppliers need to address different audiences than before and make the most of the 5 layers in the CI and IS stack,’ says Martin Hingley, CEO of ITCandor.
For more information, please contact Martin Hingley (mhingley@itcandor.com), +441235202125 or Pim Bilderbeek (pim@themetisfiles.com), +31653902852. Or, download a summary and table of contents.
About the METISfiles and ITCandor
The METISfiles is a market research & consulting firm, client focused and dedicated to solving strategic issues for executives in the Internet , IT and Telecommunications industry. ITCandor Limited is a company dedicated to researching, understanding and advising industry executives on opportunities and trends in the Information Technology and Communications (ITC) industry.
