Dell Gains Momentum in Converged Infrastructure Market

Just a few short months ago at Dell Enterprise Forum, we announced new converged infrastructure solutions to help customers of all sizes address the challenges related to the complexity, inefficiency and rigidity in their current IT infrastructure.  Included in this announcement were the Dell PowerEdge VRTX and the Active Infrastructure 1.1 portfolio.

Flash forward two months, and I’m pleased to announce that Dell is making significant traction in the converged space and this has been recognized by leading analyst firms, including TBR, Info-Tech Research Group, ESG and IDC. 

Before we jump into the reports, it’s important to talk about Dell’s differentiated approach to converged infrastructure.  Converged infrastructure, which combines compute, storage and networking resources with infrastructure management into a virtual or physical integrated system, is a growing market as organizations strive to make their data centers simpler, more flexible and cost-effective.  Dell’s approach uniquely offers customers a choice of convergence strategies, and provides customers migration options for heterogeneous, legacy IT environments: a software-based Active Infrastructure management layer which aggregates customers’ heterogeneous legacy infrastructure investments into a virtual converged infrastructure, and physical converged infrastructure where all resources and management are included in the same chassis such as Dell PowerEdge VRTX. 

Now, onto the reports:

In the TBR “Converged Infrastructure Landscape Report”, TBR surveyed over 400 CI adopters and found that Dell is the brand most likely to be recommended by customers using more than one brand of converged infrastructure.  The report says, “As Dell continues to expand its Active System portfolio and transition customers from its vStart series, the vendor is experiencing tremendous adoption despite the young market history of Active System.”  Additionally, the report notes that, “with the expanded Active System line and the introduction of PowerEdge VRTX, Dell now goes to market with a complete, unique portfolio that targets customers across the SMB, midmarket and enterprise spaces.”

Dell Active Infrastructure was also recognized as a “Champion” in Info-Tech Research Group’s “2013 Vendor Landscape for Converged Systems” report, and was one of only three who were considered to be a leading vendor with converged infrastructure products.  The report highlights Dell’s channel strength, single-vendor support model and intuitive user interface via Active System Manager, and places it ahead of competitors Cisco, VCE and others.

In addition to these recent accolades, Dell PowerEdge VRTX continues to receive kudos from analysts, customers and partners alike.  Analyst firms Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) and IDC recently published two product features. The ESG product brief notes that VRTX has “universal appeal” and that it will “capture the attention of IT and business professionals.”  The report goes on to say that Dell VRTX is “ready to stand up to IT and business challenges with an intelligent design and economic advantage that is right-sized for today’s needs and future business initiatives.”

The IDC product flash on Dell VRTX notes that, “By bringing the VRTX system to midmarket, Dell clearly shows that it understands the opportunity in bringing resilient, secure, and highly reliable technology to run essential SMB workloads.”

Needless to say, we are very proud of the momentum our converged infrastructure solutions are seeing in the market.  We remain committed to helping customers overcome real pain-points to drive value for their business, and we look forward to continuing to share our successes along the way.

About the Author: Peter Evans