Revenue for global integrated systems is expected to reach US$12.3 billion in 2018, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, representing an 18.4 per cent increase from US$10.2 billion in 2017.
Gartner defines integrated systems as a combination of server, storage and network infrastructure, sold with management software that facilitates the provisioning and management of the combined unit.
According to the research firm, the hyper-converged integrated systems (HCIS) segment will experience the strongest growth – with 55 per cent – whereas integrated stack systems will experience a five per cent decline.
"The majority of integrated systems replace existing infrastructure, which is great for cost, agility and consolidation of IT and efficiency metrics," Gartner research director, Naveen Mishra, said.
"When implementing this as part of a digital business initiative, however, IT organisations must look at how the potential savings of capital expenditure (capex), may be offset by potential shifts in operating expenditure (opex)."
Gartner has predicted that by 2019, 30 per cent of organisations that are due to refresh integrated infrastructure systems (IIS) will shift to newer, more flexible and cost-effective alternatives, such as reference architecture and HCIS.
Gartner see strong growth in HCIS as organisations shift from IIS and that non-volatile memory express will account for five per cent of HCIS spend by 2020.
Reference architecture is the second-largest revenue contributor in the integrated systems market for 2018, according to Gartner.
"It provides a documented representation such as a blueprint, document model or graphic that illustrates "how things fit together" to address a specific business need or opportunity."
Dell EMC, Cisco/NetApp, Pure Storage and IBM are driving customer acquisition in this space according to the research firm.
Lastly, integrated stack systems will slowly reduce their contribution to the overall integrated system market. These systems are comprised of server, storage and network hardware integrated with application software to provide appliance functionality.
By 2020, Gartner predicts that 20 per cent of organisations with refresh due for integrated stack systems will shift to cloud-based alternatives.
Earlier, research firm Canalys said that Cisco, Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) were the top three infrastructure vendors of 2017, accounting for 50 per cent of the US$142 billion total worldwide shipments, which includes servers, storage and networking products.
