Worldwide Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms revenues increase

"The integrated systems market continued to exhibit strong momentum throughout 2014 and represents a growth opportunity for IT vendors," said Jed Scaramella, Research Director, Enterprise Servers. "The industry saw competitive dynamics shift in 2014 with major vendors completing company privatization 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 organizations 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."

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 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.