According to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platform Tracker, vendor revenue for the worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms market increased 19,4% year-over-year to $2,7-billion in the fourth quarter of 2014 (4Q14).
The market generated 1,2 exabytes of new capacity during the year, which was up 42,2% compared to same period a year ago. For the full year 2014, worldwide integrated systems revenues increased 28,9% year-over-year to $9,4-billion, while new storage capacity shipments grew 52,8% to 3,5 exabytes.
“The integrated systems market continued to exhibit strong momentum throughout 2014 and represents a growth opportunity for IT vendors,” says Jed Scaramella, research director, Enterprise Servers. “The industry saw competitive dynamics shift in 2014 with major vendors completing company privatisation and acquisitions, as well as many forming new partnerships. These actions are sure to set a new competitive landscape for 2015.”
“An expanding number of organisations around the world are turning to integrated systems as a way to address longstanding and difficult infrastructure challenges,” said Eric Sheppard, Research Director, Storage. “This drove $2,1-billion of net-new spending in 2014 and makes these solutions an increasingly rare source of high growth within the broader infrastructure marketplace.”
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.
The Integrated Platforms market was essentially flat during the fourth quarter, generating $917-million in sales on 0,4% year-over-year growth rate. Oracle was the largest supplier of Integrated Platform Systems with $371-million in sales, or 40,5% share of the market segment.