HPE the big dog in booming cloud infrastructure market

IDC says nearly half of IT infrastructure bought by 2020 will end up in public or private cloud environments

By 2020, almost half of the server, storage and switching gear being bought will be bound for cloud environments, according to IDC, whose latest data shows HPE has a stranglehold over that market.

In five years' time, spending on enterprise IT infrastructure kit for deployment in public or private cloud environments will account for 47.9 per cent of the overall IT infrastructure market, up from 37.2 per cent this year, the market watcher predicts.

HPE is currently the runaway market leader after selling $4.55bn (£3.2bn) of kit destined for public or private cloud environments last year, up 27 per cent on 2014.

Dell and Cisco were a distant second and third place on 10.6 and 9.6 per cent market share respectively, compared with HPE's 15.7 per cent, with EMC and IBM rounding out the top five.

IDC said it expects IT infrastructure spending for cloud and traditional on-premise environments to continue to move in opposite directions.

This year, the cloud-based chunk of the market will expand 18.9 per cent to $38.2bn, with the traditional non-cloud segment to fall four per cent, the analyst believes.

In the longer term, the cloud part will grow at 12.5 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $57.8bn 2020, representing 47.9 per cent of the total spending on enterprise IT infrastructure. Within that, public cloud will grow 13.8 per cent to $37.5bn and private cloud 10.2 per cent to $20.3bn.

In contrast, spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure will fall at a 1.3 per cent CAGR over the same timeframe.

"For the majority of corporate and public organisations, IT is not a core business but rather an enabler for their core businesses and operations," said IDC research director Natalya Yezhkova.

"Expansion of cloud offerings creates new opportunities for these businesses to focus efforts on core competences while leveraging the flexibility of service-based IT."