Many of the tech giants announced earnings yesterday including IBM, who shared sales numbers from its “PureSystems” offering that launched in 2012. Wikibon Senior Analyst noted two things about these announcements in the areas of converged infrastructure and flash storage. IBM reported that in just over three quarters, the company has sold 2300 systems from its “PureSystems” product line, which Miniman considered to be good progress.

Although there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding converged infrastructure, Miniman doesn’t view this as a new area. He recalled when blade servers first came out, which blended compute and network together, and now vendors are driving the market even further by mixing compute, network and storage together.

“It’s about simplicity, it’s about rack-based management, it’s about getting out of our silos,” said Miniman, referring to the customer environments. “They spend way too much time and effort configuring the system, tweaking it, and making sure everything works for that one application.” Converged infrastructure shows promise of being able to change those operational models.

Miniman said the percentage of converged system technology being bought by customers is still in the single digits, but in a market where the hardware alone is over $1M, by the time you add in services and support bundles, there’s a $300 billion market waiting out there. He referenced Wikibon’s forecast of the converged infrastructure market, written by Wikibon Co-Founder and Chief Analyst Dave Vellante last August.

“It’s our forecast from Wikibon that by 2017, two-thirds of that total addressable market which will be doing over $400 billion . . . will be either converged infrastructure or a reference architecture,” he said. He mentioned VCE, NetApp, IBM, HP and Dell as companies trying to grab shares of this market, as well as a number of small, innovative companies experiencing tremendous growth, such as Scale Computing, Nutanix and Pivot3.

Miniman gave some advice to CIOs for simplifying and automating their infrastructure to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage. He recommended that they could either utilize service providers or buy converged solutions. See the whole segment with Kristin Feledy and Stu Miniman on the Morning NewsDesk Show.