Hyperconverged solutions represent a new phase within the broader integrated system market. Early iterations of integrated systems were leveraged to improve long-standing datacenter infrastructure inefficiencies through tight integration of autonomous datacenter resources.

In the world of public clouds and software-defined datacenters, hyperconverged solutions take infrastructure integration to its logical next step by encapsulating the data services provided by traditional SAN-based external storage systems in highly resilient software-defined platforms that run all data and compute services on the same nodes. The hyperconverged market is emerging at an ideal time where IT departments around the world are battling ever-increasing pressures to eliminate inefficiencies and improve agility within the datacenter.

IDC believes VMware's Hyperconverged Portfolio, which is built on VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN, is at the forefront of an important and fundamental industry shift that will help drive core changes in the datacenter infrastructure market.