Enterprise on-premise infrastructure spending experiences ‘post-pandemic’ bounce-back

The amount of money enterprises are investing in their own private datacentres experienced a “post-pandemic” bounce-back in 2022, as shown by data accrued by IT market watcher Synergy Research Group.

The analyst has published its analysis of the 2022 infrastructure capital expenditure (capex) habits of hyperscalers, telcos and enterprises, finding that collectively these three groups spent $700bn last year.

The hyperscale cloud and datacentre operators accounted for just under a third (29%) of this spend in 2022, which is a marked increase from 13% in 2016, while enterprise spending in this area has hovered around the 29% mark over the same time period. The telco market’s share of this spending, however, has dropped from 58% to 42% since 2016.  

“Since 2016, hyperscale capex has grown by an average of 20% per year, while enterprise IT spending has grown by an average 6% and telco capex has been flat,” Synergy said in its research note. “In aggregate, spending has increased by an average 6% per year since 2016.”

During the 12 months of 2022, the amount spent on IT infrastructure by hyperscalers and enterprises grew by 9%, while telco capex dropped by 4%.

“Hyperscale operator share of total spending has continued to rise steadily over the past few years, while enterprise spending has also bounced back a bit in the past two years after a soft spell in 2019 and 2020,” the research note continued.

“Meanwhile, telcos remain locked in low-to-no-growth world, and their capex reflects that.”

Synergy’s insights into the shifting infrastructure investment priorities of enterprises comes at a time when other market watchers are also predicting that 2023 will see more firms either slow down the pace or press pause entirely on their public cloud migrations in a bid to cut costs.

To this point, Amazon Web Services (AWS) recorded its weakest revenue growth rate to date for the three months to 30 September 2022, with the firm attributing its performance to customers looking to cut costs due to rising energy prices and inflation.

This is backed by anecdotal evidence that – far from saving enterprises money – moving to the cloud has ended up being a more costly move than some firms first anticipated, due to the amount of money they have had to spend on refactoring their on-premise applications and egress charges.

For these reasons, it is expected that some enterprises may opt to leave their on-premise applications where they are for now and invest in shoring up the resilience and bolstering the capabilities of their existing, private datacentres for the time being.

The hyperscaler numbers are reflective of the continued and growing demand for cloud and internet-based services, while enterprise spending in this area is “more complex” to track, said Synergy, but largely down to companies investing in cloud-based collaboration and network security tools.

“There has also been something of a post-pandemic bounce-back for both enterprise datacentres and switches, the former being helped by higher costs due to supply chain issues that are being passed on in the form of higher average selling prices,” Synergy said.

“For equipment and software vendors, the good news is that overall IT infrastructure spending will continue to grow steadily over the next five years.”