Worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms revenues increase 45.6 pc YoY

FRAMINGHAM,USA: The International Data Corporation (IDC), revenue for the worldwide integrated infrastructure and platforms market increased 45.6 percent year over year to nearly $7.6 billion during calendar year 2013. The market generated 2.4 exabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the year, which was up 78.6 percent compared to 2012.

"Integrated systems have been one of the most important developments in the evolution of the enterprise datacenter," said Jed Scaramella, research director, Enterprise Servers. "The strong growth in the market is a testament to customers' realization of the value proposition and benefits these systems deliver. IDC expects the market to continue on its growth trajectory in 2014."

"The market's continued double-digit growth rate comes at a time when the value of the general infrastructure market remains relatively sluggish," said Eric Sheppard, research director, Storage. "This can largely be attributed to the clear advantages integrated systems offer over general infrastructure in the form of faster time to deployment, consolidated management, reduced downtime, and improved utilization rates."

Integrated platforms vs. Integrated infrastructure

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.

The Integrated Platforms market generated nearly $3.6 billion in sales during 2013, which represented a 12.2 percent year-over-year growth rate and 47.3 percent of the total market value. Oracle was the largest supplier of Integrated Platform Systems with $1.4 billion in sales, or 39.1 percent share of the market segment.

Integrated Infrastructure sales grew 98.7 percent year over year during 2013 on nearly $4.0 billion worth of sales. This amounted to 52.7 percent of the total market value. VCE was the top-ranked supplier of Integrated Infrastructure in 2013, generating revenues of $979.3 million and capturing a 24.6 percent share of the market segment.