The global converged systems market saw revenues grow by 12.1 percent year-over-year to just over $2.9 billion in the second quarter of this year, according to International Data Corp. (IDC).

IDC said in its latest Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker that Q2 saw 1,693 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments, up 31.8 percent from a year ago.

“More and more, we are seeing end users looking beyond the hardware specs and performance metrics; end users in this market are looking for vendors that are adept at building and maintaining deep customer relationships,” stated Kevin Permenter, IDC’s senior research analyst for computing platforms. “Converged system vendors that are able to build these deep relationships with their customers are positioned for growth.”

In its report IDC splits the converged systems market into four distinct categories, including integrated systems, certified reference systems, integrated platforms and hyper-converged systems.

The combined revenues of the integrated infrastructure and certified reference systems segments rose 4.7 year-over-year to $1.6 billion. Leading the way in these categories was EMC Corp., now called Dell EMC, which pulled in $699.58 million in revenues to claim a 43 percent share of the market. Some distance behind in second place was Cisco Systems Inc. and NetApp Inc., which together pulled in $429.54 million in revenues, with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) ending up in third place with $290.72 million in revenues.

Things were less rosy in the integrated platforms segment, which saw revenues fall by 3.5 percent year-over-year to $864.09 million, which is around 21 percent of the overall market’s revenue. Oracle Corp. came out on top in that category with revenues of $481.97 million, amounting to a 55.8 percent share of the market. It was followed by HPE and IBM with revenues of $84.65 million and $44.39 million respectively.

In contrast, the hyper-converged systems segment apparently saw some stunning growth in the second quarter, with sales rising by 137.5 percent year-over-year to $480.62 million in revenue. Somewhat mischievously however, IDC refused to provide any details of the top vendor’s revenues in the category, which means you’ll have to buy the report if you want to be privy to that particular piece of information.

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