IDC’s 4Q2016 Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker has once again recognized Dell Technologies as No. 1 in the total converged systems market in terms of revenue, units shipped and new capacity shipments. In particular, Dell leads the Integrated Infrastructure Systems segment with a 73 percent market share up six percentage points from the 67 percent in 4Q15. This IDC Tracker also confirmed our phenomenal growth in hyper-converged systems revenue, which was up 206 percent (Y/Y) during the fourth quarter of 2016. According to IDC, Dell Technologies captured 26.9 percent share of the overall Converged Systems (CS) revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 and 28.4 percent share of the calendar year revenue. We are clearly a leader in this market.
A huge thank you to our customers and partners for their support and belief in us. This dynamic growth would not have been possible without their backing. While we are rightfully proud of our continued position as No. 1 in converged systems, a segment that we created and have been undisputed leaders of for several years, I’m thrilled with our success in the hyper-converged systems category, the fastest growing segment of the converged systems landscape. According to IDC’s 4Q2016 Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, revenue from Dell Technologies HCI portfolio outgrew the total HCI market—one of the fastest growing IT markets—by more than two-fold and accounted for 20.9 percent of hyper-converged system shipments in the fourth quarter of 2016.
HCI Comes of Age
From a humble start as the younger sibling of converged infrastructure, HCI has quickly come of age and is expected to outgrow the total converged systems market each of the next five years. This is borne out by the fact that we are seeing customers deploy HCI for a broad range of workloads from VDI (Rent-A-Center), real time data analytics (Dimension Data), running core applications to support fast expanding businesses (The CSI Companies), and DevOps to hybrid cloud environment. All the indications are that HCI is gearing up for prime time.
Dell Success in HCI
Dell is no stranger to success and has one of the broadest portfolios of market leading products, all in one place. However, our HCI growth has been phenomenal and we are the fastest growing vendor in the IDC Tracker. Let me explain why this is such a crucial and remarkable achievement.
Dell customers are benefitting from the HCI capabilities of both Dell and EMC. Dell has been in the HCI market since 2014 with the XC Series powered by Nutanix. The EMC business established its HCI presence not so long ago and in just over the past 12 months, we have created a highly successful business in VxRail and VxRack. VxRail in particular has grown at a tremendous rate. Since its launch, Dell has sold more than 8,000 VxRail nodes—exceeding 65 petabytes of storage and 100,000 cores—to more than 1,000 customers in dozens of industries across 78 countries. Simplicity, scalability and automation at the right price point are the key ingredients for this success. Benefits realized by customers such as Data Recognition Corporation and Convergys are testament to this fact.
Similarly, VxRack is charting its own success path with numerous deployments with Fortune 500 companies, across a wide spectrum of verticals from financial institutions and insurance to hospitality. These businesses depend heavily on VxRack as their core HCI data center that will help them to deliver on their IT transformation aspirations.
Our XC Series is also performing strongly, surpassing our goals and expectations as it forges ahead into new opportunities in addition to meeting the increased demand we’re seeing from existing customers, keen to grow their installations as additional workloads are added to their XC Series infrastructure. Click here to check out how customers such as Cardlytics are taking advantage of our solutions.
We know one size doesn’t fit all and Dell’s HCI portfolio can cover a majority of workloads and customer needs, including customers who have standardized on industry leading VMware solutions (VxRack SDDC and VxRail) and those who need a choice of hypervisors, different operating systems and bare-metal container use cases (VxRack Flex). We are leaving no stone unturned.
Dell + EMC = Better Together
Although the two legacy companies might have embarked on their HCI paths at different times and via different routes — we have, as part of our integration efforts, set ourselves the goal of becoming No. 1 in the HCI market by the end of 2017. We’re very close to hitting that goal. And here’s what’s even more encouraging: we are rapidly closing the gap between ourselves and the #1 vendor, and pulling away from the No. 3 and No. 4 vendors.
This remarkable better together result has been achieved by constantly innovating, continually striving to provide customers with the best solutions, and not resting on our laurels. What better example of this than incorporating, in less than six weeks after the Dell merger closed, Dell PowerEdge, into our VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems portfolio. Highlighting the formidable strength of the Dell partnership, this development again reiterated that we are stronger, and better together.
A few weeks ago we announced Dell Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on VxRail Appliances. As organizations increasingly move towards hybrid cloud as an enabler for IT transformation and adopt HCI for mission critical workloads, EHC on VxRail Appliances will allow organizations to start small and grow as their demand for hybrid cloud services increases. We also announced Native Hybrid Cloud, a turnkey cloud native platform based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, on VxRail earlier this year and Dell Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is also available VxRack Flex. All this further underlines the commitment of Dell’s Converged Platforms and Solutions Division to continue to be at the forefront of driving adoption of converged and hyper-converged solutions at every price point.
Later in the year, we will introduce new more affordable consumption models and a hybrid cloud platform solution based on the Azure Stack. Our mission is simple: to become our customers’ trusted advisor for the next industrial revolution and expedite their IT transformation journey. We will do this by developing solutions that meet customer needs for a full range of workload applications built on a modern IT infrastructure that delivers scalability, agility, flexibility and powerful results.
