IDC increases cloud infrastructure spending forecasts

IDC has increased its forecast for global sales of cloud infrastructure this year on the back of a very strong showing in the second quarter.

The analyst house charted a 48.4% increase in the volume of infrastructure products, including servers, storage and Ethernet switches, sold by vendors and fulfilled by the channel in the second quarter of 2018. As a result, the forecast for the full year is now coming in at $62.2bn, a year-on-year increase of 31.1%.

Spending is increasing in both public and private cloud areas, up by 58.9% and 28.2% in the second quarter respectively, with the combined investments in cloud infrastructure now accounting for almost half of all infrastructure spending globally.

Anything connected with cloud is sprinkled with growth dust, and IDC has predicted that spending in cloud environments will grow by double digits this year.

It is not as if traditional, non-cloud IT is dying – it still accounted for 51.5% of the total infrastructure market in the quarter, and came in with 21.1% growth – but it is markedly lower than cloud-related spending.

“As share of cloud environments in the overall spending on IT infrastructure continues to climb and approaches 50%, it is evident that cloud – once an emerging sector of the IT infrastructure industry – is now the norm,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, IT infrastructure and platforms, at IDC.

“One of the tasks for enterprises now is not only to decide on what cloud resources to use, but how to manage multiple cloud resources,” she added. “End users’ ability to utilise multi-cloud resources is an important driver of further proliferation for both public and private cloud environments.”

The top three vendors in terms of market share in the second quarter were Dell, HPE and Cisco. But the shining star in terms of revenue growth, year on year, in the second quarter was Lenovo, which delivered a 223.5% increase, putting it in fourth place in the table.