Gartner square-slicers name Cisco and Nutanix integrated boxen bosses

The Borg's got fingers in so many integration pies it's frightening

The chasing pack

Among the chasing pack, Scale Computing wins praise for sticking to its small-to-medium business niche, IBM drops to niche status because of its x86 offload to Lenovo. IBM may not mind its niche status because Gartner says its customers are displaying “decreasing confidence in Lenovo's credibility as an enterprise vendor following the System X acquisition.” Talk about a hospital pass.

SimpliVity wins praise for “expansion and growth on all fronts from a strong, early VDI base” but there's caution as Gartner sees a need to do better on “mission-critical workloads, ERP, high availability/disaster recovery and DBMS clusters”.

Gridstore makes its debut in this quadrant on the back of its strength in the Hyper-V market. Nimboxx is another new entrant and is noted for shipping a complete stack based on a KVM hypervisor. Pivot3's the other debutant with linear scalability in IOPS cited as a strenght.

Bull has been dropped from the quadrant, as has Unisys because “market momentum for the x86 variant [of the Forward platform] has been very slow”.

Overall, Gartner says “the integrated system market is beginning to grow in nuance, but users should still consider many of the integrated system products as adolescent, meaning more innovation, and importantly, more change is to come.”

With a market likely to soon exceed ten billion simoleans, Gartner therefore believes “we can expect to see further numbers of startup organizations eager to enter.” Consolidation is on the cards, as is blurring between market segments “as providers evolve their offerings, integrate new technologies and expand their market addressability with new product strategies.”

So strap yourselves in, dear readers, this is a rapidly-evolving market in which, as we've recently seen with HP dumping EVO: RAIL after mere months in the market, plenty of action can be expected. ®