Thirty per cent of IT infrastructure spending is on cloud - IDC

Global vendor sales for cloud infrastructure up 25 per cent annually

Cloud infrastructure accounted for almost a third of overall IT infrastructure spending in Q1, up from a quarter a year ago, according to IDC.

The analyst said vendor sales of cloud infrastructure – servers, storage and Ethernet switches – including public and private cloud, rocketed 25.1 per cent year on year to $6.3bn (£4.03bn) in Q1.

The sales boost saw cloud IT infrastructure spending climb to 30 per cent of overall IT infrastructure spending in the quarter, up from 26 per cent a year ago.

Revenue from infrastructure sales for private cloud grew 24 per cent year over year to $2.4bn, while sales for public cloud grew at a similar rate – 25.5 per cent – to $3.9bn over the same period.

HP was the standout performer in the market in Q1 – it retained its place as market leader after a 37.4 per cent jump in sales to $985m saw its market share nudge up to 15.7 per cent compared with 14.3 per cent a year ago.

Dell, Cisco and EMC – which came in second, third and fourth place respectively – enjoyed double-digit growth and market share gains.

NetApp was the only top-five vendor to see its grip on the market loosen: its share in Q1 was just 4.4 per cent, down from 5.4 per cent a year ago, after sales grew just 1.5 per cent.

Kuba Stolarski, IDC research manager for server, virtualisation and workload research, said the cloud market's success is demonstrative of the industry's move towards the third platform of IT.

"Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms," he said.

"Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernise their IT for the third platform, begin to deploy next-generation software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms."