IBM last week announced the sale of the 10,000th PureSystem integrated system since the announcement of the converged system line in April 2012. While the stand-alone server market is shrinking, the converged system market in general is growing steadily – a recent IDC report puts market growth at 68 percent per year and IBM PureSystem’s growth at 2.6 times the market overall. And while IDC’s market growth estimate is on the high end, virtually every industry analyst agrees that converged systems are the future of on-premise computing and that the market is growing at at least 30%.

As Wikibon CTO David Floyer explained in a recent Professional Alert, converged systems save customers money by reducing the complexity of purchase, maintenance, and general management. The key is the single SKU, and the more that can be included in that SKU, the higher up the hardware/software stack that reaches, the better the overall deal for the customer. In the case of PureSystems that SKU includes not just the server, storage, and networking hardware, but also the OS, management software, hypervisor, and with the PureApplication version the Pattern that automatically optimizes the system for the kind of application the client wants to run and in some cases the application itself.

PureSystem also comes in four different base hardware configurations designed for different kinds of compute loads. So PureApplication is an application-centric design, intended to run one or more applications. PureData is data centric, designed to support a large data warehouse or big data analysis and can come with Hadoop pre-installed. PureFlex and Flex Systems are designed for infrastructure buyers including managed and cloud service providers. All come pre-virtualized, and some customers have built private or hybrid clouds on a PureSystem base, linking to the IBM cloud.

Lenovo sale impact

PureSystem uses both x86 and IBM Power processors, combining them in one box in the case of some PureFlex models. The x86 models come with either Linux or Microsoft Windows, and the Power servers run IBM AIX.

IBM PureSystems Director of Marketing Pete McCaffrey said in an exclusive interview with SiliconAngle that IBM’s sale of its x86 systems to Lenovo should have very little impact on PureSystems or its customers. “We are absolutely continuing in the integrated system space. We retain all the PureSystems branding. Our higher value solutions – PureApplication and PureData System – will continue unchanged. We’ll just source the x86 technologies from Lenovo [instead of IBM].”

Concerning reservations David Floyer expressed about IBM’s ability to continue to provide converged systems after the sale based on whether Lenovo will change the microcode, McCaffrey said, “A lot of the value of these integrated systems is in the management software. Across the board, IBM has retained ownership of that management software.” IBM does not anticipate any microcode issues.

The one difference some customers will see, he said, is in PureFlex. IBM will continue to market the Power-based and combined Power-x86 based versions. Lenovo, he implied, will take over marketing the x86 PureFlex systems running the same IBM management software. “We have entered into a strategic partnership with Lenovo where we can license technology in either direction.” IBM will continue to provide all support and maintenance for all the PureSystems, so customers will see no change at that level. Given that both companies are certainly interested in continuing the success of PureSystems in the converged device market following completion of the sale – which may take several months – they both have strong reasons to maintain complete integration between the different pieces that go into PureSystems boxes.

Customer uses

IBM announced several PureSystems clients as part of the announcement of the 10,000th system sale. “One that we featured, ABC Capital [a large Mexican financial institution] – is typical of a lot of clients out there that are extremely cost conscious and are looking at ways the can consolidate and simplify their IT infrastructure,” McCaffrey said. “That’s a hot-spot for PureSystems. ABC Capital selected us primarily because they thought our solution is a way to accelerate their migration initiative to an infrastructure that can support the mobile technology and social network needs of its clients. We have a lot of customers that are leveraging Pure as a fast path to private cloud. Some of that is around virtual desktop solutions.”

FleetRisk Advisors, he said is “kind of a niche analytics provider” focused on fleet management logistics including driver safety records, number of hours behind the wheel, which can indicate fatigue levels, and driver retention. “They’ve used PureData for Analytics technology to create a Software-as-a-Service environment which makes it a lot easier for them to grow their clientele base.”

eWell Technologies Co., Ltd, is an ISV in the hospital market in China. It selected PureApplication System as the hardware platform on which it is delivering its hospital information integration platform to its customers for use in-house.

“I had an IT executive at one client in the healthcare industry say, ‘You know, I feel like I’m in the manufacturing business, and that I want an assembly line that pulls all these IT technology components together. I gotta get out of the manufacturing business and get on with the healthcare business.’” That sums up what may be the largest attraction of converged systems in general and Pure in particular, for CIOs.