Vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products for cloud IT, including server, storage and Ethernet switch, grew to $32.6 billion in 2016 at a 9.2% year on year climb, according to the latest note from IDC.
The missive, which appears in the company’s latest quarterly cloud IT infrastructure tracker, found that cloud IT infrastructure sales, as a share of overall global IT spending, was at 37.2% in Q416, up from 33.4% this time last year.
Private cloud infrastructure growth was led by Ethernet switch at 52.7% year on year, ahead of server (9.3% growth) and storage (3.6%). For public cloud, it was a similar story; Ethernet switch (30%) and server (2.4%) grew, while storage declined by 2.1%. Revenue in traditional IT infrastructure – in other words, not cloud – decreased 9% year over year in the fourth quarter.
Looking at the leading vendors, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cisco remain top, albeit with the former two losing market share and revenue year over year, finishing at 17.3% and 14.6% share respectively. Cisco grew 23.1% in revenue and 1.5% market share to 11.3%, while the biggest climbers were Huawei, moving ahead of IBM with a 61.4% revenue growth year on year. IBM, Lenovo and NetApp were tied for fifth.
“Growth slowed to single digits in 2016 in the cloud infrastructure market as hyperscale cloud data centre growth continued its pause,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing platforms in a statement. “Network upgrades continue to be the focus of public cloud deployments, as network bandwidth has become by far the largest bottleneck in cloud data centres.
“After some delays for a few hyperscalers, data centre buildouts and refresh are expected to accelerate throughout 2017, built on newer generation hardware, primarily using Intel’s Skylake architecture,” Stolarski added.