Understanding HCI Analyst Reports (Gartner, Forrester) in 2020

December 11, 2020|news

There are a lot of different organizations that perform market research and analysis. some of them are well known and others not as much. The model is essentially this:

Information gathered by researchers> Reports Created > Investors buy reports

There’s a bit more nuance to it though.

1) Each research organization will perform a detailed analysis of several market sectors. This will include a set of criteria that encompass the capabilities of one or more solutions by a number of companies. Each participating company will need to provide information back to the research organization to be included in the report. If a company does not provide the information requested or does not wish to participate, then they will be excluded for that specific report.

Here are a bunch of well known research organizations,

2) The reports generated by these companies are used in a number of ways. First and foremost, they are provided at a price, to people or organizations that want insight into market information for investment purposes. The reports also directly affect share value of the companies listed in them. The second use case is for comparative analysis of prospective solutions for CIOs, managers and general consumers. However, since the reports are only provided at a cost, the public facing free information is not the entire report. So the movement, trends, and reasoning for the ranking presented is not presented. Thus context can be lost without supporting information.

Two very popular reports that are generated are the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) and Forrester Wave reports. These generally have a lot of sway and credibility in the industry. Nutanix has been in a number of different reports over the years and the categories have changed with the industry. When Nutanix first started to get noticed, it was included in a converged infrastructure comparison, and not hyperconverged, because the market was too small. As time went on and there were more competitors in the space, it made sense to have a separate HCI analysis. However, there were some flaws in the reporting as some hardware vendors were using other software solutions to provide a complete solution. So they were getting the double the recognition that they should have. A solution to that is to have a software-only HCI comparison. The problem with that is that not all analyst organizations see eye to eye on which companies should be included in the reports. So you will see different players in the Gartner MQ vs the Forrester Wave because of this.

Below are the latest 2020 HCI results for both. After it is all said and done, the current market data shows a 2-horse race with Nutanix and VMware. Both have a large portfolio of solutions to tackle any workload, however the implementation strategy is different. VMware has the software defined datacenter (SDDC) with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and Nutanix has AOS and Prism. 

• VCF includes ESXi, VSAN, NSX and the vRealize Suite
• The Nutanix stack includes AOS (Core HCI) and Prism (Management, monitoring, automation, network virtualization). 

Both companies also have an array of offerings that can be enabled to provide additional functionality.

Forrester WAVE for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Q3 2020 

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software 

December 2020

What I am seeing over time is that Nutanix and VMware lead the market by all measures, regardless of the report. Nutanix has a higher ability to execute and a stronger current offering. VMware has a slightly higher completeness of vision, which is due to their foray into public cloud and partnerships. However, that may change soon due to some leadership changes at Nutanix. 

The other contenders are for niche use cases, only participate in some regional markets, or only target SMBs. I think there will always be competition, but the magnitude of difference almost requires different categories to compare against. The less mature offerings are also being acquired, consolidated and in a state of flux in the current economy.

Get the reports from here:

https://www.nutanix.com/go/forrester-wave-2020

https://www.nutanix.com/go/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-hyperconverged-infrastructure