IDC announces that global converged systems market grows 3.5 percent year over year during the third quarter

According to data released this week by the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, global converged systems market revenue increased 3.5 percent year over year to US$3.75 billion during the third quarter of this year. 

IDC's converged systems market view offers three segments: certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms, and hyperconverged systems. The certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure market generated roughly $1.26 billion in revenue during the third quarter, which represents a contraction of 8.4 percent year over year and 33.7 percent of all converged systems revenue. 

Integrated platforms sales declined 13.9 percent year over year in the third quarter of this year, generating $475 million worth of sales. This amounted to 12.6 percent of the total converged systems market revenue. 

Revenue from hyperconverged systems sales grew 18.7 percent year over year during the third quarter of 2019, generating nearly $2.02 billion worth of sales. This amounted to 53.7 percent of the total converged systems market.

"The converged systems market continues to grow despite a challenging overall datacenter infrastructure environment," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "In particular, hyperconverged solutions remain in demand as vendors do an excellent job positioning the solutions as an ideal framework for hybrid, multi-cloud environments due to their software-defined nature and ease of integration into premises-agnostic environments."

IDC offers two ways to rank technology suppliers within the hyperconverged systems market: by the brand of the hyperconverged solution or by the owner of the software providing the core hyperconverged capabilities. 

As the data relates to the branded view of the hyperconverged systems market, Dell Technologies was the largest supplier with $708.4 million in revenue and a 35.1 percent share. Nutanix generated $262.2 million in branded hardware revenue, representing 13.0 percent of the total HCI market during the quarter. There was a three-way tie for third between Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, generating $109.0 million, $91.9 million, and $91.5 million in revenue each, which represents 5.4 percent, 4.6 percent, and 4.5 percent share of the market share respectively. 

From the software ownership view of the market, new systems running VMware hyperconverged software represented $766.2 million in total in the third quarter of this year vendor revenue, or 38.0 percent of the total market. Systems running Nutanix hyperconverged software represented $549.2 million in third quarter vendor revenue or 27.2 percent of the total market. Both amounts represent the value of all HCI hardware, HCI software, and system infrastructure software sold, regardless of how it was branded at the hardware level. 

Quantela works with Cisco to introduce Outcome-based Project Financing for smart city projects

Quantela Inc. and Cisco have developed a unique, market disruptive Outcome-based Project Financing Model that will be launched at the Smart City Expo World Congress. The model can help cities get started on their Smart City projects by converting the upfront CapEx investment to an Outcome-based payment, that is tied to achieving solution SLAs and project KPIs.

Cities globally are in a state of transition that is impacting them in multiple ways. Budgetary pressures of having to deliver more with less; Capacity pressures due to rapid urbanization. 

Some of the key concerns on the minds of City Mayors are: How can they find new opportunities for revenue maximization and cost optimization? How can they attract investments into the city and create vibrant public-private partnerships? How do they derive value with the data being collected by the city from various sources? How can they provide a good quality of life for the residents?

With such radical forces in action, it is imperative for cities and Municipal Corporations globally to adopt different financial structures that would help them acquire new technology to deliver more efficient and cost-effective urban infrastructure services like reducing energy consumption for public street lighting, reducing traffic congestion and improving revenues from city parking, improving efficiencies related to waste collection and bridging the digital divide using City Wi-Fi Services.

One of the first cities in North America that has embraced the outcome-based Project Financing Model is the City of Erie, PA to launch the second phase of its Secure Smart City project that will be implemented in the Opportunity Zones of Erie. The project scope will involve the operations of Cisco Kinetic for Cities (CKC) Platform combined with Quantela's Atlantis Intelligence Solution to launch smart city services.

“Cities worldwide are harnessing the power of technology to reduce traffic congestion, bridge the digital divide, enhance connectivity, promote economic development, fight crime and make local governments more sustainable and resilient,” said Mayor Schember. “We are excited to partner with Cisco Systems and Quantela to execute this ambitious project and what it can mean for Erie's growth as a center of innovation.”

ConvergeOne updates managed services lineup with Digital Infrastructure Manage Offering powered by OnGuard

ConvergeOne announced Thursday that it has expanded its managed services portfolio with the launch of its Digital Infrastructure Manage offering powered by OnGuard. 

With ConvergeOne's Digital Infrastructure Manage offering, customers receive purpose-built Managed Services that deliver proactive fault identification, isolation and avoidance, enabling ideal operational experience for their enterprise networking and data center infrastructures. 

ConvergeOne Manage combines ITIL-based best practices delivered by highly skilled engineers using ConvergeOne's custom developed OnGuard 7 management platform with intelligent threat detection and advisory services from Alert Logic, providing the most proactive and complete enterprise networking and data center offering in the market. 

The Digital Infrastructure Manage offering utilizes ConvergeOne's custom developed management and AIOps platform, OnGuard. For years, OnGuard has been the trusted tool to deliver ConvergeOne Managed Services in voice, unified communications, contact center and video environments, with thousands of unique devices across hundreds of customers this year itself. 

ConvergeOne's new OnGuard 7 update provides a standardized platform of tools, services, and automation that extends to customers' enterprise networks and data centers.

ConvergeOne's Digital Infrastructure Manage offering and OnGuard managed services platform have been designed to address the rapidly evolving IT landscape, which features public, private, and hybrid clouds; software-defined environments; higher demands on networks; and increased network and data security monitoring requirements. 

While IT administrators often struggle to keep up with these changes, outsourcing to third party service providers or purchasing new service management tools tend to be expensive and complicated to implement and maintain. ConvergeOne's offerings are unique, enabling customers to maintain their infrastructures at peak performance and availability in a cost-effective, adaptable and transparent manner.

Earlier this month,  ConvergeOne announced that it has extended its Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution into the mid-market segment with the launch of its ConvergeOne Cloud Experience (C1CX) Mid Market offering.

C1CX provides a secure, scalable, and comprehensive collaboration experience that changes the way people communicate, share content, and manage projects—all with the goal of getting more done with less. C1CX Mid Market for UCaaS consists of two Powered by Solutions - Powered by Avaya and Powered by Cisco. 

ConvergeOne also partners with RingCentral.

Cisco joins with Perch Security to help MSPs protect, detect and respond to an increasing threat landscape

Cisco partnered with Perch Security to deliver a new security solution for managed service providers (MSPs) who are challenged by an evolving threat landscape. MSPs are on the front lines of protecting their clients against data breaches, malware, ransomware and other attacks for which they are often unprepared. 

To address these threats, Cisco is applying its security expertise and portfolio to MSPs in partnership with Perch to bring them the tools that will strengthen their security posture and better protect both themselves and their clients.

The combined technology solution offers clear benefits for Cisco partners and their customers by correlating events from both the endpoint and network, reducing ticket counts and lowering labor costs. 

Perch has integrated with Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints and Cisco Umbrella, ingesting their logs and feeding them into Perch’s security information and event management (SIEM) solution.

Its features include Perch’s Security Operations Center (SOC) that provides event correlation, alert review, and custom alert options; and Perch’s Duo integration correlates Duo Multi-Factor Authentication and endpoint visibility with data from other Perch-connected cloud services, such as Office 365, Cisco Umbrella and Cisco AMP. 

By combining these solutions into a single pane of glass, alerts are correlated and consolidated to reduce tool sprawl. Perch feeds data from cloud services and security products into a single data lake that is monitored by Perch SOC.

This announcement ties into the newly created Cisco Secured MSP offer, which includes a free, internal use license program and gives MSPs the ability to elevate their internal security and protect themselves from attack. This works by using DNS solution from Cisco Umbrella for MSP, next-generation endpoint detection and response with Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and cloud-based threat detection from Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud. 

The Cisco secured MSP offer brings the best of security to every MSP and the knowledge and training to get it right the first time through the Protect Your House course on ConnectWise MSP University. Cisco helps partners grow managed service revenue with incentives, promotions and market development funds (MDF).