According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms Tracker, the worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms market increased revenue 28,1% year over year to $2,3-billion during the third quarter of 2014 (3Q14).
The market generated more than 898 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, which was up 46,6% compared to same period a year ago.
“These results speak to the ability of integrated systems to address core data centre infrastructure challenges,” says Eric Sheppard, research director: storage at IDC. “Those that are deploying integrated systems tell IDC of real gains in the form of increased productivity, reduced downtime, and improved utilisation rates.”
“While core IT hardware markets exhibited modest growth in 2014, the integrated systems market is experiencing significant growth,” says Jed Scaramella, research director: enterprise servers at IDC. “In the past year IT vendors have invested heavily in product portfolios and go-to-market efforts for integrated systems, resulting in increased adoption among customer IT environments.”
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 optimized 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 optimized for a specific workload.
During the third quarter of 2014, the Integrated Platforms market generated more than $763-million in sales, which represented a 7% year-over-year growth rate and 33,3% of the total market value. Oracle was the largest supplier of Integrated Platform Systems with $310-million in sales, or 40,7% share of the market segment.
