Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a growing market ripe with opportunity for vendors. TBR forecasts the market will reach $11.7 billion by 2022. Although TBR research indicates that incumbent vendors with a strong presence in the converged infrastructure (CI) market, such as Dell EMC and Cisco, have an advantage in the space, findings also indicate that a growing number of smaller vendors are rising in popularity. Add to that the approximately one-quarter of existing customers who indicated that brand is not a key factor in their decision making, and it becomes clear that the opportunity to take share from existing vendors is high. Further, with nearly three-quarters of respondents indicating they have not yet taken the plunge into the HCI space, there is massive opportunity, through strategic marketing and support, for vendors to encourage new adopters to be their customers.

HCI has a significant place in the cloud market

Eighty-four percent of respondents indicated they are leveraging HCI for either hybrid or private cloud installations. TBR believes this suggests that cloud is not necessarily an inhibitor to HCI adoption, as some vendors may perceive. Further, we believe this signals that consumption-based pricing options, which 81% of respondents indicated they would be interested in considering in the future, will encourage more HCI adoption. Consumption-based pricing enables customers to select HCI for a capex solution as well as for public cloud if they choose, and they can simply compare performance and other features between the two to make purchasing decisions. Vendors can capitalize on this flexibility with strategic marketing.

IT leaders play a crucial role in the HCI decision-making process

HCI remains a strategic purchase, as evidenced by the fact that 74% of respondents indicated IT directors and managers were one of the decision makers. TBR believes that as customers become more familiar with HCI and their HCI vendor, they will be more likely to make repeat purchases and will be less likely to demand direct-from-vendor sales.

To learn more about TBR’s Hyperconverged Platforms Customer Research, contact Stanley Stevens ([email protected]) or your account executive.

In my day-to-day life at TBR, I regularly interact with clients seeking to undertake pricing research. Their needs are varied. Some want to understand pricing for a new product or service or sustain their competitive position for an existing offering, while others seek to design an overarching commercial strategy or to increase the effectiveness of their sales teams by arming them with tactical data and insights — and nearly all are focused on influencing revenue and margin.

Capturing pricing data that can be utilized defensibly for decision making is challenging. All pricing is situational and can be influenced by any number of factors. Pricing decisions influence, and are influenced by, nearly all organizational departments, from sales and finance to product management and business strategy, and thus are often highly politicized within ICT enterprises.

Based on our regular experience in serving the pricing research and consulting needs of our client base across ICT industry segments, we have identified five critical success factors that can help clients navigate these challenges:

• Start with outcomes: We often find that our customers come to us with a research concept in mind, but not a defined goal or set of operational plans for how the research will be deployed in their organization. Sometimes the request is: “We need to know what vendors like us are charging.” But the real goal of the team may be to answer the question: How can we be more efficient in resourcing deals? By starting with the end goal and use case in mind, we find that we often explore areas adjacent to pricing, and that insights on those topics, in concert with pricing data, unlock business value for our client base.
• Focus on business impact: For all the research we do at TBR, including in pricing, we advise our clients to frame all research needs around the underlying business impact. We design projects, including the questions we propose to cover in primary research and the data that we seek to capture, to ensure that the recommendations we deliver around pricing aim directly at influencing business strategy, revenue and profitability.
• Focus on context: Our pricing research methodology relies on interviews with vendors and customers. This approach allows us to capture not only pricing data but also contextual data and insights on topics such as discounting, commercial incentives, pricing structures and portfolios. When paired with core quantitative pricing data, these types of interview-driven insights provide predictive value focused on vendor and customer pricing and consumption behavior.
• Build market constructs: To normalize against deal-specific influencers that can impact a true view of market pricing, we design our research to focus on deal constructs. These constructs are used in all interviews to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons and that we are characterizing a full spectrum of potential price points. Context on topics such as discounting is addressed through qualitative conversations.
• Consider adjacent markets: Many times, particularly with clients seeking to stand up pricing models and price levels for new offerings, we find that the direct peer landscape may not be the best basis of comparison. By looking at adjacent offerings and considering how similar-yet-adjacent offerings are packaged and delivered, clients are able to gain a broader foothold in their peer landscape in its entirety, and often identify areas to elevate value proposition and raise prices accordingly.