Market Overview: Converged Infrastructure Solutions In 2013, Part 1 Of 2

The leading IT infrastructure hardware vendors, such as Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP, IBM, and Oracle, have offered basic converged infrastructure (CI) solutions for several years. In 2013, Forrester estimated that nearly 40% of IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals will have implemented these solutions. However, in the last 18 months, CI offerings have matured beyond their original blade-based roots. Today, I&O professionals have three distinct categories of CI offerings to choose from: modular converged infrastructure architectures, integrated application-specific platforms, and software-defined infrastructure solutions. This report helps I&O professionals understand how converged infrastructure solutions have matured, what benefits they offer, and presents a new taxonomy to evaluate CI offerings. A second report in this series will detail the vendor and solution landscape.