Integrated Systems Drove $1.2 Billion In Sales In Q2, Says IDC

October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It isn’t just vendors that are talking about integrated systems that converge servers, networking, and storage into a single system. It looks like customers are doing some buying, too.

According to the latest market research by IDC, sales of integrated infrastructure platforms like IBM’s PureSystems machines drove $1.32 billion in revenues in the second quarter, up 50.2 percent from the year-ago period. IDC has just started tracking sales of integrated infrastructure and integrated platform sales, the latter having a higher software component and usually being tuned for specific workloads. In the IBM lineup, the former is technically called a PureFlex and the latter is called a PureSystems or even a PureApplication machine, depending on how deep the software is.

Anyway, in the second quarter, which is the latest data that IDC has available because the third quarter just ended a few weeks ago, the market researchers figure that integrated infrastructure systems accounted for $775.7 million in sales, up 80.3 percent year-on-year. The partnership between Cisco Systems and NetApp had the biggest slice of this part of the market, with $203.1 million and giving them more than a quarter of the market.

The richer integrated platform systems configurations represented a smaller market in the second quarter, at $539.4 million in sales, and is growing more slowly too, at 21.1 percent growth compared to Q2 2012. That said, the server market is stalled at the moment, so this kind of growth is stupendous against that backdrop. Oracle is the dominant supplier in this part of the integrated systems market, with $305.9 million in sales, or a 56.7 percent share; it does not have any market share in plain vanilla integrated infrastructure systems–yet.

Add them up, and Oracle is the dominant supplier, followed by Cisco/NetApp, and then the Virtual Computing Environment partnership between Cisco and EMC is third with $176.1 million in sales. All other vendors, which includes IBM’s PureSystems, accounted for $629.9 million in revenues.