The prognosticators have been at the tea leaves and crystal balls again. This time, an IDC study has found that cloud hardware spending will break $4bn (£2.34bn) across EMEA in 2014.

The report, entitled EMEA IT Infrastructure Hardware for Public and Private Cloud 2011-2018 Forecast, saw year on year growth of 19% and “confirmed that cloud is the major disruption factor in the EMEA infrastructure hardware market”, according to a press release.

According to the researchers 15% of infrastructure spend in EMEA will be related to cloud environments in 2014. This went up from a miserly 8% in 2011 and will grow to more than 22% by 2018.

$3.4bn (£1.99bn) was spent on hardware going to cloud environments in EMEA through 2013, with the majority of it (42%) going on public cloud environments. 38% of spend went to on-premise private clouds, and 20% by hosted dedicated private clouds, showing a relatively even mix.

This won’t last though, with figures showing that public cloud spend will accelerate to the point of contributing almost $3bn in spend alone by 2018, as can be seen in the graph below:

Credit: IDC

Perhaps less surprisingly, strongest growth in EMEA is driven by Western Europe.

“In the longer term, IDC expects greater adoption of hybrid cloud with benefits for both private and public consumption”, said Monhammed Hefny, senior research analyst at IDC EMEA. “Hybrid cloud allows customers to retain sensitive data behind a corporate firewall while still taking advantage of cloud-related lower costs.”

Recent cloudy IDC predictions include a report from David Tapper on the state of the IaaS market which concluded that IBM was the vendor of choice for the US enterprise market, whilst the analyst house’s emphasis on big data, social, mobility and cloud for the future of IT is remarkably similar to Gartner’s Nexus of Forces – remember analyst firms usually like to disagree with one another, of course.

What do you make of this?