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Many Pivot3 channel relationships are at an immature stage, while the company develops itschannel and solutions partner strength for broader coverage.
Pivot3 has limited hardware OEM partnering and limited third-party support.
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Scale Computing
Founded in 2008, Scale Computing is a privately held company that is attempting to position itselfas the HCIS provider of choice for SMBs with 50 to 500 employees, where ease of use and price arethe paramount decision criteria. Scale Computing's first product was a scale-out storage clusterthat, with enhancements, is now providing the storage layer of its HC3 virtualization platform. Anexperienced management team, a rapidly growing installed base of HC3 customers and the abilityto raise multiple relatively small rounds of venture capital funding have all aided Scale Computing inthis effort.
To limit unburdened manufacturing costs, the current family of HC3 virtualization platforms uses anopen-source hypervisor (based on KVM) and a Web-based GUI, and eliminates the need for aseparate physical management server. Scale Computing's development priorities are somewhatcounterbalanced by the HC3's use of RAID 10 to protect against solid-state drive (SSD) and HDDfailures, and via the lack of data reduction services, such as data compression and deduplication.However, the use of RAID 10 does benefit performance by improving the locality of referencebetween applications running virtual machines and the corresponding data protection. It also
provides high levels of locality of reference to improve performance running the storage stack in thekernel. This improves performance and reduces memory overhead. HC3 supports the use of snaps,which protect against logical corruption problems and asynchronous remote copy, which protectsagainst site failures.Strengths
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Scale Computing is targeting a market that is not well-serviced by larger competitors, as thosecompetitors have inherently higher costs.
Scale Computing has created a scale-out architecture that can be efficiently sized to individualworkloads.
Scale Computing's technology enables direct provisioning of virtual machines.
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Cautions
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HC3's current lack of data compression, deduplication and erasure coding as an alternative toRAID 10 could — depending upon workloads — narrow or eliminate the HC3 cost advantagerelative to other integrated systems.
Many SMBs may be unwilling to swap their current hypervisor (frequently VMware or Hyper-V)for a proprietary KVM-based hypervisor, which may not be supported by key ISVs.
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Some IT organizations will be nervous doing business with a privately held IT company that hasyet to prove its long-term viability in the integrated system market.
SGI
SGI is recognized as a provider of high-performance computing (HPC), and most of the company'sintegrated system focus on maintaining this reputation. The company is growing its HPC marketshare; for example, SGI's share of the list of the top 500 global supercomputers has grown fromslightly over 3% to 5.8% in the past 18 months, which compares well with vendors like Lenovo(3.4%), Fujitsu (2.6%) and Dell (2%).
SGI sells a variety of solutions: SGI ICE XA, which is the flagship product, aimed at addressing themost complex and challenging HPC needs; SGI Rackable platform, which addresses a broader
spectrum of HPC requirements, and can be scaled from a relatively small configuration; and SGI UV,a platform intended to broaden SGI's reach beyond its HPC roots. SGI has launched a version ofthe UV aimed at SAP Hana users, and the system is currently the largest certified Hana appliance —recently extended to address up to 20 sockets as a single node, with support for 15TB memory(and a plan of record to further increase to 32 sockets and 24TB of memory in the near future). SGIaims to target additional in-memory compute opportunities with this platform, across a range ofmarkets and workloads. Finally, SGI has also targeted extreme scale-out workloads like Hadoopand data warehouses with the InfiniteData Cluster, which can support almost 2PB of storage perrack.
SGI is well-positioned in markets for HPC and other extreme-scale workloads, but the companymust still work hard to expand its installed base into vertical markets, where other brands are moreprevalent and technology excellence is not always the primary driver. SGI's international breadthbeyond the U.S. is good, especially in Europe and Japan, but technology buyers should validate thestrength of SGI's local skills, especially for projects outside SGI's HPC domain.
A new alliance with Dell should enable both companies to leverage each other's complementarystrengths in deal situations that would normally challenge either the technology portfolio or industryknow-how of each individual vendor. SGI is expected to pursue other alliance opportunities.Strengths
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As a globally respected expert in the HPC market, SGI is well-positioned to benefit from thestrong HPC attributes that many emerging Mode 2 workloads will exhibit.
SGI is one of a handful of vendors to command credibility among the HPC buying community,and has a natural annuity business of existing and new HPC buyers looking to extend or replaceexisting configurations.
By investing in platforms like UV and InfiniteData Cluster, and through alliances with vendorslike SAP and Dell, SGI is able to leverage its technology strengths to target workloads andcommercial markets beyond its traditional industry focus.
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Cautions
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SGI's strong and lasting association with HPC creates a challenge for the vendor todemonstrate the aptitude to address broader market needs.
SGI's client base is numerically small, which makes the company dependent on a sales funnelthat is prone to spikes and uncertainty.
SGI will be challenged to grow its SAP viability where vendors like HP have a much moreestablished footprint, and where buyers are less likely to be swayed by vendor argumentsbased on a strong technology orientation.
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SimpliVity
SimpliVity is a Boston-based HCIS vendor that has made rapid progress since its first productshipments started in 2013. The company has capitalized on the strong acceptance of the term\months. SimpliVity has not only ridden the hyperconvergence cycle, but has differentiated itself in acrowded market by its use of hardware-assisted compression and deduplication. This enablesSimpliVity to deliver an active expansion strategy, both technically and commercially — theevidence being strong bottom-line commercial growth and a marked increase in client inquiry.SimpliVity has also commenced partnering with other vendors, including an established OEMrelationship with Cisco and rumors of further partnerships with other major system vendors. Thishas propelled SimpliVity into consideration for many CIOs' portfolios. Diversity and solution breadthis demonstrated by the SimpliVity claim that over half its clients run their complete IT infrastructureson the SimpliVity-branded solution.
SimpliVity's vision remains strong in 2015, with the main improvement reflected in consistent
execution. This has included expansion and growth on all fronts from a strong, early VDI base. Otheruse cases, like mission-critical workloads, ERP, high availability/disaster recovery and DBMSclusters are being increasingly implemented by SimpliVity, but still need qualifying with valid
references — especially across all geographies and verticals. However, these workloads representnuances and opportunities that SimpliVity and other HCIS vendors are grasping with success.
During the next year, we expect SimpliVity to further improve on scalability, load balancing, failover/fallback capabilities, HA functions, remote replication, stretch cluster deployments and to furtherexpand hypervisor/container support. This should help SimpliVity improve relative product
attractiveness and drive continued revenue growth in the coming years, which the company canmost easily expand through incremental sales to its SMB/midmarket base. However, for enterpriseusers, SimpliVity's replication techniques will often overlap with other domain replication, such asstorage, VM, cluster, DBMS and file system. This puts the onus on SimpliVity to prove a businesscase for displacing incumbent technologies.Strengths
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SimpliVity has been able to grow its value proposition from a foundation of project-based
opportunities like VDI, to address an ever-broader variety of mission-critical use cases. This has
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developed from SMB/midmarket growth to increasingly displace existing enterpriseInfrastructure.
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The HCI modularity of OmniCube enables high scaling in small server/storage increments; and ithas a highly innovative design that incorporates in-line deduplication and data compression atorigin, and provides a global namespace and native virtual machine backup.
SimpliVity's management tools connect to existing management frameworks via standard APIs(vCenter/OpenStack), and wide-area support facilitates business continuity strategies andmanagement of remote sites.
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Cautions
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Clients should validate the pre- and postsales capabilities of local channel partners (especiallyoutside North America).
SimpliVity is more mature at selling to SMB/midmarket customers. For greater success in sellingto enterprise customers, the company needs to prove a robust business case to displace
existing solutions that address the HA and disaster recovery needs established in the enterpriseportfolio.
Because shipments of OmniCube began in early 2013, the installed base is still growing from afoundation that was initially skewed toward projects like VDI. Users should qualify morecomplex use cases using relevant reference clients, preferably in the same vertical industryand/or region.
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Teradata
Teradata's origins date back to 1979, although the company spent many years as a division of NCRbefore being spun out in 2007. The company has been shipping integrated systems for over 15years, although always with a strong focus on business intelligence. The company is based inDayton, Ohio, and has offices around the globe.
Teradata has always maintained a strong presence in the enterprise data warehouse and analyticsmarket, and has a very loyal installed base. But it competes on two fronts: First, it competes withMoore's Law in that the hardware needed to address its average workloads halves every 18months. Second, it competes again with Moore's Law in that its competitors double their
capabilities year over year. As a result, Teradata is increasingly delivering its greatest value and
differentiation through software, although much of the company's value and margin is dependent onsales of servers, disks and other hardware.
With the advent of large in-memory and virtualized mission-critical workloads, Teradata is facingrenewed competition from major system vendors with the growing market focus on large or in-memory analytics for SAP, SQL Server, Oracle or Hadoop. Individually, the technologies slowlyerode the Teradata value proposition, but collectively they mean that Teradata is stretched todifferentiate on many fronts. This places ever greater emphasis on Teradata's ability to find newcustomers and not rely on churning the base. But with partners like SAP increasingly investing insoftware products that compete with Teradata (for example, SAP Hana), this increases the potential
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Gartner, Inc. | G00266749
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