Integrated infrastructure and platforms revenue grows 57% year over year

The portion of Western Europe sales in EMEA has remained stable at about 85% with Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) capturing the remaining 15% of EMEA market value in the first quarter of 2014. Middle East and Africa (MEA) was the fastest growing region with revenue increasing 136% year over year thanks to several large Integrated Infrastructure projects.

The market penetration grew across all the main Western European markets, although at a different rate across countries: the UK and Germany remained stable at the top while France registered a weaker sales increase, as expected given the country's lackluster performance in the hardware sector. Meanwhile, the Rest of Western Europe group increased its share, reflecting ramping up adoption in other emerging markets beside the more mature Nordics and the Benelux.

“The less cost-sensitive enterprise segment has proved once again appreciative of the large operational savings brought about by integrated systems, which, coupled with quick time of deployment and easy support, is often cited as the main purchase driver by users. However, with new opportunities opened up by wider data availability, enterprises are increasingly turning to integrated systems to support their big data and cloud projects,” said Silvia Cosso, senior analyst, IDC Western Europe Storage. "Nevertheless, the high price point and the presence of legacy systems can slow down adoption in Western Europe, especially across SMB as well as in more conservative markets."

"Many datacenters in emerging markets are greenfield deployments due to lower dependency on legacy solutions compared to developed countries. Building the IT project from scratch provides an opportunity to implement new technologies and address business requirements for scalable, reliable, and virtualized datacenters through integrated systems," said Jiri Helebrand, research manager, IDC Servers, Systems & Infrastructure Solutions, CEMA.

IDC defines integrated infrastructure and platforms as pre-integrated, vendor-certified systems containing server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment and basic element/systems management software at the point of sale. IDC segments this market into two categories:
• Integrated platforms, systems 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, which leverage the same infrastructure building blocks as integrated platforms, however are not optimized for a specific workload, but designed for general-purpose, distributed workloads instead.
Integrated infrastructure systems have reached a share of 65% on total sales in EMEA, registering a staggering 97% year-over-year increase in 1Q14. VCE seized the lead in this category from Cisco/NetApp’s Flexpod, while HP successfully held its number 3 position.

"Each of the major suppliers of datacenter hardware has an integrated system strategy in place, despite tackling the market from different angles. The deeper the roots in high-value enterprise customers, the more pronounced the efforts from a supplier," said Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager, European Enterprise Servers, IDC.