HPE Makes Big Gains In Hyperconverged Over Dell, Nutanix

‘With great support from the the HPE marketing, channel and sales teams we continue to identify new prospects, which are resulting in competitive takeouts,’ says Paul Cohen, vice president of sales at PKA Technologies. ‘We have beat Dell head to head in the hyperconverged market a number of times over the last year.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s worldwide hyperconverged system sales soared 53.5 percent in the second quarter even as rivals Dell Technologies and Nutanix posted declines in hyperconverged revenue, according to the latest data from market researcher IDC.

HPE posted hyperconverged system sales of $130 million in the second quarter with 7 percent market share compared with $84.7 million with 4.6 percent market share in the year-ago quarter, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker results released this week.

Dell Technologies, the hyperconverged market-share leader, meanwhile, posted a 2.6 percent decline in hyperconverged revenue for the quarter, while Nutanix posted a 2 percent revenue decline, IDC said.

[Related: HPE’s Hyperconverged ‘Earthquake’: AMD EPYC Versions Of SimpliVity, Nimble dHCI]

Overall, Dell posted worldwide hyperconverged system sales of $519.6 million with a 27.9 percent share of the market in the second quarter compared with $533.2 million with a 29 percent share of the market in the year-ago quarter, according to IDC.

Nutanix, meanwhile, posted $253.5 million in hyperconverged system sales in the second quarter with a 13.6 percent share compared with $258.8 million in sales with a 14.1 percent share in the year-ago quarter, according to IDC.

The HPE revenue gains include HPE systems that run Nutanix hyperconverged software—the result of a blockbuster HPE-Nutanix OEM deal from last year.

Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner and No. 379 on the 2017 CRN Solution Provider 500, said his company’s HPE hyperconverged system sales are up double digits this year including HPE systems running Nutanix.

“This shows that the HPE-Nutanix relationship is bearing fruit,” said Krucker. “That’s been a great deal for both HPE and Nutanix, which has gotten out of the the hardware business. This allows Nutanix to sell incredibly well-engineered hardware from HPE. That deal showed great leadership on HPE’s part. We hit the ground running with Nutanix on HPE. It’s been awesome for us.”

The HPE hyperconverged charge includes a growing passionate and loyal following who “love” HPE’s SimpliVity hyperconverged system, said Krucker. “They are very ardent about SimpliVity and their relationship with HPE,” he said.

Raymond Tuchman, CEO of Experis Technology Group, a fast-growing Potomac, Md.-based HPE partner, said his company’s HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged system sales are up 100 percent this year.

“When we show customers how they can do automatic backup and data management on SimpliVity, they love it,” he said. “That automatic backup and data management functionality has been a key competitive differentiator when we go up against Dell VxRail. We just won a deal against VxRail because of that.”

One of the keys to Experis’ success has been providing high-level hyperconverged consulting services to government customers, said Tuchman.

Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies, one of HPE‘s top Platinum partners, said he sees HPE as the leader in best-in-class systems for servers including hyperconverged systems. “We have had a very successful 2020 for SimpliVity, and we have a robust pipeline as we look toward 2021,” he said.

“With great support from the the HPE marketing, channel and sales teams we continue to identify new prospects, which are resulting in competitive takeouts,” he said. “We have beat Dell head to head in the hyperconverged market a number of times over the last year.”

The impressive hyperconverged system showing from HPE comes just one week after HPE and its New H3C Group China business captured a worldwide server market share “statistical tie” with Dell by finishing the second quarter with 14.9 percent share compared with Dell’s 13.9 percent share of worldwide revenue, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

For its fiscal third quarter ended July 31, HPE’s compute revenue was $3.4 billion—flat compared with the year-ago quarter but up 28 percent sequentially.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri recently told analysts that HPE —which ships four servers and 46 TB of storage every 60 seconds—continues to strengthen its core capabilities in compute and storage.

HPE’s gains came with overall worldwide revenue from hyperconverged system sales growing 1.1 percent in the second quarter to $1.9 billion, accounting for 47.1 percent of the total converged systems market, according to IDC.