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IDC has published its IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Datacenter Infrastructure Management 2015 Vendor Assessment, following a tradition it first established in 2011. The report, the content of which is covered by copyright and therefore I won’t be quoting directly, takes a look at fifteen different vendors in the marketplace and plots them on a graphic, allowing the viewer to evaluate each according to size and relative position. IDC considers market leadership to be based on technological capability and business strategy.
Inevitably the IDC MarketScape’s effective assessment drew the headline “Who is Winning in the DCIM Software Market?” on DatacenterKnowledge.com. The journalist, Yevgeniy Sverdlik knows his stuff and is a well respected commentator on the industry. So we can conclude from the salvo in his opening paragraph that owners and operators of data centers he has met on his rounds are still skeptical about DCIM. My experience of Yevgeniy is that he is not particularly given to hyperbole.
However, both the article and the report show that DCIM is growing in adoption despite it being “expensive, complicated, difficult to implement, and difficult to define”. (To be fair to the writer, he does go on to say that the same can be said of much enterprise software). According to DatacenterKnowledge, IDC’s forecast is that the market will grow at a compound annual rate of about 16 percent between 2014 and 2019, at which point it will reach $988 million.
A billion dollar market is not to be sniffed at, and if drivers like the Internet of Things also continue to grow at a pace, there’s good reason to think that such forecasts may have more substance than earlier promises of spectacular growth. The need for greater degrees of automation to facilitate the expected growth in machine-to-machine data will create a strong business case for DCIM, both in main processing facilities and in edge computing applications.
This rise in adoption was identified in another industry organ, DatacenterDynamics Focus earlier in the year. The article “Is DCIM finally real?” was sub-headlined “After years of tall tales, it looks like data center infrastructure management (DCIM) is finally becoming a real thing.” Comments left at the bottom of the page (and there are a few), seem to point to an engaged audience which is starting to grapple with the technology.
At the same time, case studies have been published about various companies’ use of DCIM. Not the least of these is leading UK quad play service provider, Sky. The story reports the level of effort required by the data center operator and its partner, data center design and build company, Keysource. A large proportion of which was given over to what was a change management strategy by any other name, involving all of the stakeholders in Sky’s six facilities.
Collectively, pronouncements by journalists, analysts, the end user community and the software developers create a groundswell which indicates acceptance of DCIM. You might add, at long last. And long may it continue to grow as an increasing number of companies start to leverage the efficiencies which are to be gained. In the meantime I’m happy to report that Schneider Electric is named as a leader according IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Datacenter Infrastructure Management 2015 Vendor Assessment (doc #259603, October 2015).
