Do a Google News search on "Converged Infrastructure" and you'll see all the mega vendors, analyst firms, data center thought leaders and fledigning start ups talking up the growing market opportunity.

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Storage infrastructure will soon move to primarily pre-validated hardware and software systems, known as reference architectures. Industry analyst firms, like <a href="http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Converged_Infrastructure_Takes_the_Market_by_Storm">Wikibon</a>, have predicted that over half of the entire infrastructure consumed will move towards pre-validated reference architectures, rather than independently procured applications, servers, hypervisors, networking and storage products.

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Converged infrastructure is a large and growing market opportunity requiring huge investments in technology, integration, service delivery, and channel partnerships. All the major systems, storage, networking, and management suppliers have a stake in this market as users are increasingly demanding simplified deployments and fewer siloed solutions. Buyers appear ready to trade individual component performance for integration, marking a turning-point in data center infrastructure.

Converged infrastructure (CI) is an integrated set of compute, storage, and networking components with infrastructure management software that provides a single logical chunk of hardware and software that is either specifically engineered together or at the very least tested and proven in a variety of configurations and applications. Converged infrastructure simplifies hardware and software management and accelerates the deployment of infrastructure for private clouds.

In February Wikibon developed a <a title="http://wikibon.org/blog/new-data-shows-emc-and-cisco-doubling-down-on-vce/" href="http://wikibon.org/blog/new-data-shows-emc-and-cisco-doubling-down-on-vce/">back of the napkin forecast</a> for the converged infrastructure space. The catalyst for this effort was new data from EMC’s 10K regarding its recognition of VCE revenue and expenses.

We have further refined our figures providing additional granularity on the market data and are providing this update in the Wiki.

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The world has changed," said HP Senior Vice President and General Manager, Converged Systems Tom Joyce in an interview with CRN. "Customers expect everything to work like their cellphone or tablet does. They don't want to have to sit there and read a manual or take a course to figure out how to run IT anymore. This is about running IT the way your consumer technologies work. Let's make it as easy as that."

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You can virtualize all you want , but if you don't make it easier to manage it doesn't matter," she said. "What we have seen from our clients is that converged infrastructure simplification is at the top of their list. That's the problem that OneView is designed to solve."