Integrated infrastructure sees gains over 2014

According to IDC's Asia/Pacific Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platform Tracker, the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) integrated infrastructure and platform market* surged past the US$1 billion mark in 2014. The integrated infrastructure and platform systems market grew 28.4% in 2014 to total US$1.11 billion, which was in sharp contrast to 8.1% growth in vendor revenues in the server market in APeJ in 2014 compared to the previous year, the research firm said. 

"The astounding growth in spending on integrated infrastructure and platform systems exemplifies the changing mindset and buying behaviour of CIOs and heads of IT infrastructure," says Rajnish Arora, Vice President – Enterprise Computing research at IDC Asia/Pacific. "The hyper-competitive nature of the business is putting new kinds of demands on IT to become much more agile, flexible and elastic, while delivering new applications and services leveraging a highly cost optimised model."

Integrated Platforms vs. Integrated Infrastructu

Almost all of the growth in the integrated infrastructure and platform systems market in 2014 in the region was fuelled by integrated infrastructure systems, mirroring the global trend. The market for integrated infrastructure systems, which give customers the flexibility and choice of applications, database and middleware, grew 51% in APeJ in 2014 compared to 2013. IDC believes that in the long term the demand for integrated platforms will accelerate as more independent software vendors certify and bring to market their traditional as well as next-generation applications.

HighlighHff

Integrated infrastructure is the new battleground for sever and storage vendors. This rapidly emerging market segment not only provides the vendors with new avenues for growth but also to establish brand equity and mindshare in the 3^rd platform era. 

Highlights from the report include:

HP and Hitachi were the fastest growing vendors in the integrated platform systems market segment in 2014 in APEJ. 

HP's rapidly expanding portfolio of converged systems propelled it into the pole positon in the integrated infrastructure systems market segment with 27.6% revenue share in APeJ in 2014. 

VCE, which was one of the pioneering vendors in the integrated infrastructure systems segment, witnessed a 4.3% decline in revenues in 2014. 

EMC leveraged the strength of its ecosystem partnerships with compute, network and infrastructure software vendors to cement its no. 2 positon in the integrated infrastructure systems market in APeJ in 2014.

Oracle remained the dominant vendor in the integrated platform systems market segment in APeJ in 2014 with its extremely broad portfolio of engineered systems. 

The divesture of the System x business impacted IBM's ability to maintain strong momentum in the near term for its integrated platform systems, which declined 65.1% in revenues in 2014 compared to 2013. 

*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 workloads.