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The first wave of hyper-converged technology combined storage, compute and virtualization into one package, collapsing IT silos and creating a multibillion-dollar market out of one that barely existed five years ago. That wave produced two clear leaders. Nutanix, which started selling hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) in 2013 as a new concept, and Dell, which came to hyper-converged technology by combining its legacy server platform with virtualization (VMware) and storage (EMC) gained through a $60 billion-plus acquisition. Now we're ready for the second wave of hyper-converged technology, which will bring public clouds into the equation along with networking. Clouds obviously play a big role with all enterprise data center technologies these days. But public clouds are even more crucial to hyper-convergence than other on-premises storage products. After all, it's hard to truly be a converged infrastructure if you're leaving out the cloud -- or at least not presenting cloud as an option. HCI market leaders facing more ...