HP Targets Big Data as Part of its Converged Infrastructure Push

HP is hopping on the Big Data bandwagon.

On Monday the company announced a new organization, HP Converged Systems, cobbled together from various dedicated resources “…to deliver purpose-built technology for social, cloud, mobile and big data solutions.

The business unit is charged with helping accelerate the next generation of the “Converged Infrastructure concept.”  Announced last February at its yearly Global Partner Conference, HP’s Converged Infrastructure portfolio includes the latest in its blade systems, as well as converged storage, a mixed bag of networking solutions, and HP services.

According to the press release, the HP Converged Systems business unit will extend the portfolio of converged application appliances that fuse infrastructure, applications into a single system.  Included are appliance systems for Hadoop, HP Vertica, SAP HANA, and HP CloudSystem.

HP continues to be at the forefront of the data center evolution, accelerating the pace of innovation for our customers,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, HP Enterprise Group. “HP was the first to announce Converged Infrastructure, which each major technology company has since followed. Today’s organizational updates are the next logical step as we accelerate the delivery of game-changing converged systems technology.”

Although HP is quick to put its stamp on the Converged Infrastructure concept, the idea has been around for a while.  Wikipedia offers a succinct definition: “A converged infrastructure addresses the problem of siloed architectures and IT sprawl by pooling and sharing IT resources. Rather than dedicating a set of resources to a particular computing technology, application or line of business, converged infrastructures creates a pool of virtualized server, storage and networking capacity that is shared by multiple applications and lines of business.”

The Wikipedia entry goes on to say, “In April 2012, the open source analyst firm Wikibon released the first market forecast for Converged Infrastructure, with a projected $402B total available market (TAM) by 2017 of which, nearly 2/3rds of the infrastructure that supports enterprise applications will be packaged in some type of converged solution by 2017.”

Not the most elegant sentence in the world, but one that indicates that this is a big and growing market.

Wikibon also notes in another posting, “The total Big Data market reached $11.4 billion in 2012, ahead of Wikibon’s 2011 forecast. The Big Data market is projected to reach $18.1 billion in 2013, an annual growth of 61%. This puts it on pace to exceed $47 billion by 2017. That translates to a 31% compound annual growth rate over the five year period 2012-2017.”

It’s no wonder HP is setting its sights on the Converged Infrastructure and Big Data marketplaces – the combination is irresistible.

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