IDC announces that global converged systems market grows 3.5 percent year over year during the third quarter

According to data released this week by the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, global converged systems market revenue increased 3.5 percent year over year to US$3.75 billion during the third quarter of this year. 

IDC's converged systems market view offers three segments: certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms, and hyperconverged systems. The certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure market generated roughly $1.26 billion in revenue during the third quarter, which represents a contraction of 8.4 percent year over year and 33.7 percent of all converged systems revenue. 

Integrated platforms sales declined 13.9 percent year over year in the third quarter of this year, generating $475 million worth of sales. This amounted to 12.6 percent of the total converged systems market revenue. 

Revenue from hyperconverged systems sales grew 18.7 percent year over year during the third quarter of 2019, generating nearly $2.02 billion worth of sales. This amounted to 53.7 percent of the total converged systems market.

"The converged systems market continues to grow despite a challenging overall datacenter infrastructure environment," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "In particular, hyperconverged solutions remain in demand as vendors do an excellent job positioning the solutions as an ideal framework for hybrid, multi-cloud environments due to their software-defined nature and ease of integration into premises-agnostic environments."

IDC offers two ways to rank technology suppliers within the hyperconverged systems market: by the brand of the hyperconverged solution or by the owner of the software providing the core hyperconverged capabilities. 

As the data relates to the branded view of the hyperconverged systems market, Dell Technologies was the largest supplier with $708.4 million in revenue and a 35.1 percent share. Nutanix generated $262.2 million in branded hardware revenue, representing 13.0 percent of the total HCI market during the quarter. There was a three-way tie for third between Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, generating $109.0 million, $91.9 million, and $91.5 million in revenue each, which represents 5.4 percent, 4.6 percent, and 4.5 percent share of the market share respectively. 

From the software ownership view of the market, new systems running VMware hyperconverged software represented $766.2 million in total in the third quarter of this year vendor revenue, or 38.0 percent of the total market. Systems running Nutanix hyperconverged software represented $549.2 million in third quarter vendor revenue or 27.2 percent of the total market. Both amounts represent the value of all HCI hardware, HCI software, and system infrastructure software sold, regardless of how it was branded at the hardware level.