Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) plans to introduce a hyperconverged infrastructure product later in March, CEO Meg Whitman said on yesterday's first-quarter earnings call.

It's an in-house development, based on HPE's ProLiant servers and completed in "record time," Whitman told investors.

The product is a direct attack at Nutanix, which has made its name in hyperconverged infrastructure. Whitman noted that HPE's product will install in minutes and cost 20 percent less than Nutanix's wares.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a crowded market, Whitman conceded, and the incumbent vendors are making it more crowded. Just the past couple of weeks have seen new entrants announced by Cisco and by the EMC-VMware tandem.

Then there's Ericsson, which last year announced its HDS 8000 based on Intel's Rack Scale Architecture. This year, the system was a star of Ericsson's Mobile World Congress presence, as the vendor announced Quanta as a manufacturer and Telefónica as a customer.

Whitman feels HPE's entry is necessary, however, because hyperconverged infrastructure is a key to the next generation of data centers.

Separately, HPE is preparing Synergy, a system it refers to as "composable infrastructure." Hyperconverged infrastructure combines compute and storage into a single system that can grow modularly — you can add some CPUs without having to likewise add storage, for instance. Composable infrastructure takes the idea one step further by letting the application dictate how much compute or storage it needs.

Synergy, announced in December, is due to ship during the second quarter.