• 40% of AFAs will be NVMe based by 2020

• shipments of NVMe SSDs will grow to 25+ million by 2020

• something worthwhile sharing as a resource (low latency SSD pools)

• a convenient way of connecting to them (a large installed base of server PCIe interface chips were the essential starting point - but it took many years for industry standards to get agreed)

• software support - which ranges from the storage stack to multi-vendor fabric support.

the changing shape of the enterprise PCIe SSD market

• commoditization... Although the enterprise PCIe SSD market started life as a high value, proprietary technology market it was inevitable that once the PCIe flash market got big enough (and especially as PCIe SSDs started to be designed for consumer SSD roles) many of those technology and cost factors would come back to taunt the parent enterprise market with cost comparisons which would undermine the original foundations of many pioneer PCIe SSD business plans. The predictable incumbent assassin tools included:- simpler (single chip SSD controllers), standard software frameworks (like NVMe) and smaller form factors (like M.2 - which we see being used singly and also in arrays on PCIe carrier boards).
  
  Once those smaller, cheaper solutions became available and proven in the market - they changed the cost structure and roadmap assumptions of the enterprise PCIe SSD market and also created new application roles which included physically smaller spaces into which the first generation products couldn't go. The traditional way for such older product designs to go would up market - but upmarket was becoming a more competitive space too for similar and other reasons.

• new ways of server acceleration... As the enterprise SSD market became more confident in using SSDs - it became clear that the value of SSD acceleration - even within a single type of nominated CPU server - could be far more nuanced and finely grained and adaptable to different application roles (from a small SDS cluster upto a cloud scale data center) by using standard SSDs with different interfaces, latency and cost characteristics.
  
  Traditional high performance (big form factor) PCIe SSDs still had useful work they could do in this wider framework of acceleration - but they were no longer the only solution, or the easiest - but instead one of many possible solutions - in which electrical power consumption, capacity, scalability and affordability of the server were increasingly being seen as more desirable attributes than the peak performance of any single SSD.
  
  At the high end of the performance range for PCIe SSDs we're now seeing the market space being squeezed by SCM DIMM wars products too.
  
  In the current market therefore the traditional big bang ultrafast PCIe SSD doesn't seem as impressive as it used to be and instead is part of a continuum of possible performance options in the market rather than the best game in town.

• New ways of storage box acceleration... When it comes to providing easy to integrate low latency flash based cache storage in arrays of storage drives - there have been 3 factors which have between them reduced the market demand for traditional PCIe SSDs in the kind of roles we saw in hybrids in 2010, 2011 etc.
  
  The enterprise has entered or passed the early majority adoption phase of SSD storage. This means when all the bulk storage drives in a big box are already cheap SSDs (SATA or SAS) rather than HDDs - the optimum technology for local caching in such boxes is more likely to look like a small amount of memory (whatever memory may be) rather than a big fat PCIe SSD front ending the array.
  
  For general purpose applications some big SSD users have reported that using arrays of SATA SSDs with their servers gives them similar application performance (and lower cost) to having PCIe SSD rich servers (SSDserver rank 2) operating in tandem with earlier generation HDD arrays. The business consequence has been that follow up deployments of infrastructure across a wide range of cloud scale uses have tended to use lower quantities of traditional PCIe SSDs than would have been forecast from the earlier market adoption models.
  
  But significant growth is beeing seen in smaller form factors within the PCIe SSD market.
  
  In new high performance storage arrays the drives in the array are likely to be 2.5" PCIe SSDs. This removes the need or benefit of having big form factor PCIe SSDs in such storage boxes.
  
  In value based hybrid arrays - if there is still a need for some kind of low latency flash cache (in the traditional PCIe SSD role) the need is likely to satisfied by M.2 SSDs rather than a larger form factor product.
  
  In SDS applications - everything which has been said above for servers applies too.