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IDC: Worldwide cloud IT infrastructure spend jumps almost 10% in 2016
Fri, 7th Apr 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

The International Data Corporation (IDC) recently released their Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker.

The main finding? Vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 9.2 percent year over year to $32.6 billion in 2016, with vendor revenue for the fourth quarter (4Q16) growing at 7.3 percent to $9.2 billion.

Regionally, vendor revenue from cloud IT infrastructure sales grew fastest in Japan with a whopping 42.3 percent YoY in the fourth quarter of 2016, followed by Middle East - Africa at 33.6 percent, Canada at 16.6 percent, Western Europe at 15.6 percent, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at 14.5 percent, Central and Eastern Europe at 11.6 percent, Latin America at 9.9 percent and the United States at 0.1 percent.

Some of the other findings included:

  • Cloud IT infrastructure sales as a share of overall worldwide IT spending rose to 37.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016, up from 33.4 percent a year earlier
  • Revenue from infrastructure sales to private cloud grew by 10.2 percent to $3.8 billion, and to public cloud by 5.3 percent to $5.4 billion
  • Conversely, revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 9 percent year-over-year (YoY) in the fourth quarter
  • Ethernet switch led private cloud infrastructure growth at 52.7 percent YoY growth, followed by server at 9.3 percent and storage at 3.6 percent
  • Public cloud growth was also led by Ethernet switch at 30 percent YoY growth, followed by server at 2.4 percent and a 2.1 percent decline in storage
  • In traditional IT deployments, storage declined the most (10.8 percent year over year), with Ethernet switch and server declining 3.4 percent and 9.0 percent respectively

Research director for Computing Platforms at IDC, Kuba Stolarski says growth in the cloud IT infrastructure market slowed to single digits in 2016 as hyperscale data center growth continued its pause.

"Network upgrades continue to be the focus of public cloud deployments, as network bandwidth has become by far the largest bottleneck in cloud datacenters,” says Stolarski.

“After some delays for a few hyperscalers, datacenter buildouts and refresh are expected to accelerate throughout 2017, built on newer generation hardware, primarily using Intel's Skylake architecture."