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Private cloud infrastructure spending on the rise
The focus has been on public cloud for quite a while but the balance is shifting and IDC expects more action on the private side over the next few years
The attention in the cloud infrastructure space has been primarily around the growth on the public side but the demand for private solutions could be coming back into fashion.
Cloud IT infrastructure revenues fell below the volume that headed into more traditional environments in the fourth quarter of last year, according to IDC.
The channel has already encountered many customers that have become disillusioned with public cloud, largely because they failed to foresee the costs involved, and has been providing 'unclouding' services to get user data and applications back into an on-prem environment.
Those ancedotal reports now have some numbers from IDC ro back them up with quarterly spending on public cloud It infrastructure, which includes server, storage and Ethernet switches, dropping by 6.9%. That contrasted with private cloud growth of 19.6%.
Public cloud spending still dominates the IT infrastructure market but there were indications from IDC that it peaked last year at 69.6% and this is no longer a one horse race.
"The unprecedented growth of the infrastructure systems market in 2018 was shared across both cloud and non-cloud segments," said Kuba Stolarski, research director, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies at IDC.
It was always going to be a challenge matching the performance of 2018, where sales of IT infrastructure products for all cloud environments improved by 28% year-on-year in Q4 to hit sales of $16.8bn. The expectation from IDC is that next year will come in with yoy growth of 6%.
"As market participants prepare for a very difficult growth comparison in 2019, compounded by strong, cyclical, macroeconomic headwinds, cloud IT infrastructure will be the primary growth engine supporting overall market performance until the next cyclical refresh. With new on-premises public cloud stacks entering the picture, there is a distinct possibility of a significant surge in private cloud deployments over the next five years," added Stolarski.
