ccording to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms Tracker, the worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms market increased revenue 1,7% year over year to $2.4 billion during the second quarter of 2015 (2Q15).

he market shipped 1,210 petabytes of new storage capacity during the quarter, which was up 44,8% compared to the same period a year ago.

“We have a tale of two markets; integrated platforms is contracting while integrated infrastructure systems are growing rapidly,” says Kevin Permenter, senior research analyst: enterprise servers at IDC. “Organisations are leaning away from workload-specific platforms and toward general-purpose, multi-workload hardware solutions. We expect to see this trend continue through 2015.”

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 customized 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 2015, the Integrated Platforms market generated revenues of $894,8-million, which represented a year-over-year decline of -15,3% and 36,6% of the total market value. Oracle was the largest supplier of Integrated Platform systems with $482,9-million in sales, or 54% share of the market segment.