It’s apparent from International Data Corp. updated Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker released Wednesday that enterprises still have a healthy appetite for converged infrastructure systems of all shapes and sizes.

Total worldwide spending on converged infrastructure grew 14.8 percent, to $4.15 billion, in the fourth quarter of 2018, with Dell Technologies Inc. leading the way in terms of market share. Converged infrastructure is an approach to data center management that packages compute, networking, servers, storage and virtualization tools on an appliance.

IDC breaks down the converged systems market into three distinct categories. The main one is hyperconverged systems, which tightly integrate compute, storage and virtualization resources into a single system that’s managed via a common tool set.

Hyperconverged systems sales grew by 57.2% year-over-year, reaching $1.9 billion in revenue and accounting for 46.5% of the overall market.

The second-biggest segment is certified reference systems and infrastructure, which are systems that come prepackaged with servers, disk storage, networking gear and the necessary management software. This segment generated $1.6 billion in revenue, down 6.4% from a year ago to comprise 38.6% of the total market.

Then there’s the Integrated Platforms segment. These systems come with extra, integrated software and customized system engineering and are optimized to run things such as databases, application development software and testing tools. The segment saw sales of $619 million in the fourth quarter, down 8.4% from a year ago and representing 14.9% of the market.

Dell led the way in the branded hyperconverged systems hardware market with a 28.6% market share, followed by Nutanix Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.:

IDC also published a second table on the leading hyperconverged software companies, which shows that Dell’s subsidiary VMware Inc. leads the way by some distance:

“Hyperconverged infrastructure demand remains the primary driver of converged systems market growth,” said Sebastian Lagana, IDC’s research manager for infrastructure platforms and technologies. “As HCI solutions are increasingly capable of operating business-critical workloads while reducing datacenter complexity and promoting affordability, the segment will continue to expand its share of the overall converged systems market.”

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