EMEA infrastructure spend is cloud-bound

Cloud-related share of EMEA server, storage and switching expenditure will rise to 39 per cent by 2019, predicts IDC

Cloud will account for nearly two in every five dollars spent on servers, storage and switches in EMEA by 2019, according to IDC.

In an indication of just how swiftly compute, networking and storage capacity is moving off-premise, some 17 per cent of total IT infrastructure spend in the region was associated with public and private cloud last year, IDC said, up from 14 per cent in 2014.

The market for cloud-related infrastructure – comprising servers, disk storage and Ethernet switches – hit $4.1bn (£2.7bn) over the 12 months, a 28 per cent hike on the previous year.

But the growth won't stop here, with IDC predicting the market will rise to $10.8bn by 2019, equal to 39 per cent of total infrastructure spending.

The traditional on-premise market, meanwhile, will be "stagnant, if not declining", during the same timeframe.

Western Europe accounted for 82 per cent of EMEA cloud business last year, IDC added.

Giorgio Nebuloni, associate director of IDC European Cloud Practice, said: "Though in public cloud environments the region is lagging the US and China – where the largest web players have their roots – in 2014 it went through a phase of considerable datacentre investments as US multinationals such as AWS, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce expanded presence to serve customers with regionally located datacentres, and native service providers fought back with investments of their own."

In terms of storage capacity, cloud represented about 32 per cent of total EMEA capacity in the final quarter of 2014, 52 per cent up on an annual comparison, IDC said.