A new industry forecast from Gartner Inc. shows that it’s all coming together in the world of hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS).

Garner’s latest forecast shows that the HCIS market is positively booming, on track to be worth $5 billion by 2019. Gartner calls HCIS the world’s fastest growing market for integrated IT systems, and says hyperconverged systems will effectively become “mainstream” by the end of the decade, as part of a “third wave of integrated systems” that emerges in the data center.

HCIS can be defined as a platform that utilizes a software-defined approach and runs on commodity hardware, delivering shared computing and storage resources together with a unified management interface. Gartner adds that hyperconverged systems will “deliver their main value through software tools, commoditizing the underlying hardware.”

“We are on the cusp of a third phase of integrated systems,” explained Gartner analyst Andrew Butler. “This evolution presents IT infrastructure and operations leaders with a framework to evolve their implementations and architectures.”

Right now the enterprise IT market is stuck firmly in the ‘second phase’ of integrated systems, which is marked by the maturity of converged infrastructure and the “advent of HCIS for specific use cases”. The first phase covered the rise of blade servers from 2005 to 2015, and the next decade will see the rise of the ‘third phase’, marked by “continuous applications and micro-services delivery on HCIS platforms,” Butler said.

Some of the attributes to be expected in the third wave of integrated systems include capabilities like dynamic scheduling of workloads, as well as the emergence of application container and cluster orchestration tools. In addition, Gartner also believes this phase will see the emergence of a fabric-based infrastructure to deliver these capabilities, together with disaggregated and modular hardware building blocks. When all this comes together, the result will be the continuous delivery of applications as backend functions become automated, allowing DevOps teams to focus solely on getting their apps up and running, Gartner said. Continuous delivery will also allow organizations to achieve “continuous economic optimization,” essentially a return on the heavy investment in hyperconverged infrastructure.

To date, most HCIS uses cases have been fairly limited in scope, leading to silos in the existing infrastructure, Gartner says. In order to knock down these silos, advances in networking and software-defined IT are needed, it adds.

However, once HCIS finally goes mainstream it will allow software-defined systems and expanding automation to transform IT infrastructure into “a malleable utility under the control of software intelligence and automated to enable [IT-as-a-service] to business, consumer, developer and enterprise operations.”

Gartner said it expects a lot of overlap in the next few years as cloud-native and software-defined approaches slowly enter production. During the interim period, Gartner says IT leaders must continue to focus on the continuous delivery of applications, as this will be the main factor in propelling HCIS towards mainstream use.

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