The worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms market increased revenue by 33,8% year-over-year to $2,4-billion during the second quarter of 2014 (2Q14).
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms Tracker, the market generated more than 833 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, which was up 63,4% compared to same period a year ago. First half results were comparable with the market value growing 35,9% compared to 1H2013, to $4,3-billion.
“It’s notable that sales of integrated systems have driven considerable and continued growth at a time when many portions of the enterprise infrastructure market have experienced lacklustre results,” says Eric Sheppard, research director: storage at IDC.
“Integrated systems have clearly become a critical go-to market approach and an important source of growth for infrastructure suppliers looking to capitalise on a market need to reduce data centre infrastructure inefficiencies.”
“IDC continues to find enterprise customers bullish in their adoption of integrated systems; a greater number of customers are considering these solutions in their IT procurement decisions,” says Jed Scaramella, research director: enterprise servers at IDC.
“As a result the integrated systems market is shaping up to be a competitive battleground for IT vendors. A critical win in the market translates into increased footprint within the customer base, usually at the expense of a competitor.”
IDC distinguishes between two market segments: Integrated Platforms and Integrated Infrastructure. Integrated platforms are integrated systems that are sold with additional pre-integrated packaged software and customised system engineering optimised to enable such functions as application development software, databases, testing, and integration tools.
Integrated infrastructure systems are designed for general-purpose, distributed workloads that are likely to have differing performance profiles. While integrated infrastructure is similar to integrated platforms in that it will leverage the same infrastructure building blocks, it is not optimised for a specific workload.
During the second quarter of 2014, the Integrated Platforms market generated more than $1-billion in sales, which represented an 11,1% year-over-year growth rate and 43,7% of the total market value. Oracle was the largest supplier of Integrated Platform Systems with $577-million in sales, or 55% share of the market segment.