Hyperconverged infrastructure vendors like Cisco and Microsoft will prosper in the years ahead as the global market should exceed $33 billion by 2026. So says Allied Market Research, which projects a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 31%. The market was worth less than $3.9 billion in 2018.

There is a huge opportunity in hyperconverged infrastructure for partners in the years to come.

Key hyperconverged infrastructure vendors include Cisco, Dell, HPE, Huawei, Microsoft, NetApp, Nutanix, Pivot3, Scale Computing, VMware and more.

A unified, software-defined system, HCI combines all traditional data centers. Those include storage, computation, networking and management. HCI combines this data center hardware using locally attached storage resources to create flexible building blocks that can replace legacy infrastructure.

Growth Drivers

Business-critical applications deployed on a three-tier IT infrastructure will transition to HCI. That’s because of reduced capital spending, operating expenditure and the ability to recover from a disaster.

Furthermore, HCI offers integrated stack systems, integrated infrastructure systems and integrated reference architectures. These advantages should drive HCI market growth through 2026.

The growth of data centers should increase HCI adoption. HCI can disrupt the enterprise data center by fragmenting it’s data silos to manage the storage, network and compute stack with simplicity and flexibility. Therefore, the need for a built-in and integrated HCI data protection offering is gaining high traction among data center industries, which are expected to support market growth.

HCI reduces infrastructure costs by combining or incorporating commodity hardware with a common operating model. Commodity hardware hosts applications such as virtual machines or containers.

Vendor lock-in may hinder HCI market growth. Another concern — HCI is less elastic. And it requires massive costs to add a new resource to the existing HCI. This feature of HCI might also hinder its market growth.

In terms of revenue, the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry dominated the global HCI market in 2018 and should continue the trend through 2026.

North America held the largest HCI market share in 2018 and is expected to continue its dominance. Adoption of technology that provides cloud-like economics for existing data centers is a major factor driving the region’s adoption of the HCI market.

In addition, APAC should provide various growth opportunities for HCI vendors through 2026.