The converged infrastructure is a fast-growing arena, expected to become an industry worth over $400 billion by 2017.  The stakes are high as more companies seek simplification in this sector, and the major IT vendors are looking to get in on the bounty.  Research firm Wikibon has decided to focus on converged infrastructure this week in three new articles that look into this booming space.

Senior analyst Dave Vellante, who’s also the co-host of theCube, provided Wikibon’s latest findings in this market – an extension of an earlier report from last month. Converged infrastructure is going to be worth $402 billion by 2017, and two thirds of enterprise apps are going to run on CI in the same year.

Almost every single major IT solutions vendor has already gotten itself a piece of the pie, including EMC. The storage provider’s main front here is VCE, a joint venture between itself, VMware and networking gear maker Cisco.

Analyst Stu Miniman writes in his latest post that over 75 percent of Vblocks are sold through partners, an observation that also ties in with this week’s broader look into this industry.  Miniman makes the argument that resellers are crowding this particular product ecosystem with their own variations to a manufacturer’s  offering,  which in turn leads to more complexity and overhead in the data center.

“Systems Integrators (SIs) and value-added resellers (VARs) have been building solutions of stack components based on customer requirements for years; this has led to some of the heterogeneous mess that exists in most data centers today. While it is good to deliver what the end-user wants, there is a correlation between variability and lifecycle cost of a solution.”

This leads to the third highlight by Wikibon CTO David Floyer, which focuses on the approaches to solving this issue.  The keyword is simplification, and he presents a number of variations and a case study presenting ways to achieve what can be a 30 percent cut in IT budget.

Simplifying at the platform level will also be an important shift for CI, as Alex Williams points out.  This is where the real opportunity lies, as frameworks around convergence emerge in this evolving space.  The channel also plays an important role in this simplification process, as IBM also makes moves with its PureSystems offering, competing alongside HP, Cisco and EMC in the CI space.