January 19, 2012 - International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new vendor assessment and market analysis profiling the leading providers in the worldwide Datacenter Infrastructure Management (DCIM) market.
The IDC MarketScape report utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology that produces a definitive assessment of each vendor's current market capabilities and strategies for competing in the future. According to IDC's research, CA Technologies and Schneider Electric hold prominent positions within the "Leaders" category for 2011/2012, while several others, including Raritan, nlyte Software, iTRACS, and Modius, all hold strong positions as "Major Players."Although IT and facilities are both feeling the demands to keep businesses running smoothly, these two distinct branches of the organization continue to travel down different paths. As new deployment models such as cloud, outsourcing, hosting, colocation, and traditional IT challenge the datacenter's typical mode of operation, it is critical to keep power, cooling, space, servers, networking, and storage all in equilibrium. "There's a growing need, and opportunity, for DCIM vendors to step in and seamlessly orchestrate space, power, and cooling with changing IT system requirements," said Michelle Bailey, research vice president, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends. "Of course, efficiency, availability, and cost remain as the seemingly unattainable balancing act in the datacenter today."
The process for choosing a DCIM vendor is becoming increasingly complex as well. In the past two years, more than 20 companies claiming some level of capability and strategy have entered the DCIM market. But, not all DCIM vendors are created equal.
Additional findings from IDC's DCIM MarketScape report include the following:
- The worldwide DCIM market continues to evolve rapidly
- DCIM providers' products either serve the enterprise well but are not easy to use, or serve the small to medium-sized datacenters and are simple to deploy and manage
- Given the projected growth in DCIM, there will be significant partnering and a few key acquisitions over the next one to three years
- The majority of the DCIM market is in the United States
This study, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Datacenter Infrastructure Management (DCIM) 2011 Vendor Analysis (IDC #232449), assesses a number of vendors participating in the datacenter infrastructure management market. This evaluation is based on a comprehensive framework and set of parameters that assess vendors relative to one another and to those factors expected to be most conducive to success in this market during the short and the long term. Vendors included in this analysis are: CA Technologies, Emerson Network Power, iTRACS, Modius, nlyte Software, Power Assure, Rackwise, Raritan, Rittal, Schneider Electric, Sentilla, and Viridity.
The study is composed of two key sections. The first is a definition or a description of what characteristics IDC analysts believe make a successful DCIM vendor. These characteristics are based on more than 10 in-depth interviews with DCIM buyers and key analysts' observations of industry best practices and were defined in consultation with many of the leading DCIM vendors in the market. The second part of this study is a visual aggregation of multiple vendors into a single bubble-chart format. This display concisely illustrates the observed vendors in the DCIM market. The strategies axis represents a three- to five-year span and future perspective, while the capabilities axis represents current product and go-to-market execution.
