Who has 2,000 tickets to the gun show? Cisco's HCIA platform HyperFlex

+Comment After 18 months of selling, some 2,000 customers are travelling along the Cisco HCIA highway.

HyperFlex is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA), marrying acquired Springpath's software with Cisco's UCS servers.

Back in February, there were more than 1,000 customers.

Seven months later, in September, Cisco blogger Rob Salvagno said there were more than 1,800 HyperFlex customers, a rise of about 80 per cent.

Now, nine months later, we're told by a Cisco consultant that it has some 2,000 customers for HyperFlex.

In its November results, CFO Kelly Kramer mentioned a "solid uptick of our HyperFlex data centre offering" in her prepared remarks.

In the earnings call, CEO Chuck Robbins said: "On the hyperconverged offer, our HyperFlex offer, I would tell you that it has continued to probably be at the high end of my expectations. I'd say a couple of quarters ago it began to exceed what I was expecting so I changed my expectations... but they're doing a great job."

One customer has reportedly bought 800 nodes and is preparing to order 2,000 more, but this is unsubstantiated. That will be one happy sales rep.

For comparison, in September Nutanix said it had 7,051 customers, which was up 87 per cent year-on-year, a gain of 3,280 customers in the year.

+Comment

In customer count terms, and without actual unit numbers, we can only say that it appears Dell EMC and Nutanix are the two HCIA leaders, with HPE, Cisco, Scale Computing and Pivot3 (more than 2,000 customers) in a second tier, and others, such as NetApp, some way behind. In this rapidly maturing market, Cisco is becoming a major player. ®