According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 14,8% year over year to $4,15-billion during the fourth quarter of 2018 (4Q18).
“Hyperconverged infrastructure demand remains the primary driver of converged systems market growth,” says Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC.
“As HCI solutions are increasingly capable of operating business-critical workloads while reducing datacenter complexity and promoting affordability, the segment will continue to expand its share of the overall converged systems market.”
IDC’s converged systems market view offers three segments: certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms, and hyperconverged systems. The certified reference systems & integrated infrastructure market generated $1,6-billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, which represents a year-over-year decline of 6,4% and 38,6% of total converged systems revenue.
Integrated platforms sales declined 8,4% year over year in 4Q18, generating revenue of $619-million. This was 14,9% of the total converged systems market revenue. Sales of hyperconverged systems grew 57,2% year over year during the fourth quarter, generating $1,9-billion in revenue. This amounted to 46,5% of the total converged systems market.
IDC offers two ways to rank technology suppliers within the hyperconverged systems market: by the brand of the hyperconverged solution or by the owner of the software providing the core hyperconverged capabilities. Rankings based on a branded view of the market can be found in the first table of this press release and rankings based on the owner of the hyperconverged software can be found in the second table. Both tables include all the same software and hardware, summing to the same market size.
As it relates to the branded view of the hyperconverged systems market, Dell was the largest supplier in 4Q18 with $552,4-million in revenue and a 28,6% share of the market. Nutanix generated $284,9-million in branded revenue, which represents 14,8% of the total HCI market during the quarter and 49% of the total HCI revenue generated through sales of systems running Nutanix software. HPE was the third largest branded HCI vendor with $104,9-million in revenue and 5,4% market share.
From the software ownership view of the market, systems running VMware hyperconverged software represented $734,9-million in total fourth quarter vendor revenue or 38,1% of the total market. Systems running Nutanix hyperconverged software represented $576,2-million in fourth quarter vendor revenue or 29,8% of the total market. Both amounts represent sales of all HCI software and hardware regardless of how it was branded.