Companies across the world are still furiously modernising their IT infrastructure to support cloud services, according to analyst IDC, which reports ‘healthy’ growth in this sector continues.
It notes that vendors of servers, storage and Ethernet switches are all experiencing declining revenues in traditional IT environments. The figures also indicate increasing confidence in public cloud services, claims IDC.
The latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker from IDC compiled sales figures for Q3 2015 and found a 23% rise in revenues on the same period in 2014, with total revenue of $7.6 billion being reported by manufacturers.
Infrastructure investment is growing at a faster rate than application sales, the report noted. The proportion of cloud IT infrastructure sales in the cloud industry climbed to 33.8% in 3Q15, up from 28.7% a year ago. The revenue from infrastructure sales to the private cloud sector grew by 18.8% to $2.9 billion, while sales to the public cloud rose by 25.9% to $4.6 billion.
By contrast, Q3 revenue from sales to traditional (non-cloud) IT set ups fell by 3.2% in comparison to the previous year’s third quarter, with sales of three technology segments (servers, storage and Ethernet switches) all going into decline in the non-cloud sector. However, all three technology markets showed compensating growth in the cloud sector. Strong year-over-year growth in both private and public cloud segments is reported, with server sales leading the charge in the private cloud sector, growing at 24.3%. Meanwhile, in the public cloud, sales of Ethernet switches are growing fastest of all equipment types, rising by 37.8%. Public cloud spending on storage grew 26.7% year on year.
This healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments indicates an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure according to Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Hardware and Platforms at IDC. “As public cloud offerings continue to improve in reliability and security, customers are becoming more comfortable with the flexibility they get from these these elastic environments,” said Stolarski.
Sales in Japan grew fastest in Japan at 47.1% year over year, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at 35.3%, Western Europe at 22.1%, Canada at 22.0% and the United States at 20.1%. However sales in Central and Eastern Europe fell 10%, which IDC attributed to political turmoil.
“As public cloud continues to becomes the de-facto choice for compute, users will greatly benefit from the next generation of container technology, which will enable true usage-based billing and flexible IT infrastructure that scales according to demand – rather than the fixed instances set by the provider,” commented Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts. “It’s time for public cloud to deliver the next generation of infrastructure to customers and bring utility computing to the present so customers can stop paying for capacity they’re not using.”