Datacentre spending now dominated by cloud

Traditional non-cloud datacentre equipment spending has plunged by 18 per cent in the last two years, according to analyst Synergy Research

Spending on public and private cloud datacentre equipment has grown to about two thirds of the total market, according to analyst Synergy Research Group.

Total datacentre infrastructure equipment revenues hit $30bn (£22bn) in the second quarter of 2017, with public cloud infrastructure accounting for over 30 per cent of the total and private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure accounting for over a third, said Synergy.

While the public and private cloud portion of spending have grown by a respective 35 and 16 per cent over the last two years, traditional non-cloud datacentre hardware and software spending has dropped by 18 per cent, according to Synergy.

The main beneficiaries of this market shift are the Asian ODMs, which in aggregate account for the largest portion of the public cloud market, its figures show. Cisco is the leading individual vendor in the public cloud space, followed by Dell EMC and HPE.

The private cloud segment is currently led by Dell EMC, HPE and Microsoft, a trio which also boss the declining non-cloud datacentre market, although in a different order.

"With cloud service revenues continuing to grow by over 40 per cent per year, enterprise SaaS revenue growing by over 30 per cent, and search/social networking revenues growing by over 20 per cent, it is little wonder that this is all pulling through continued strong growth in spending on public cloud infrastructure," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy.

"While some of this is essentially spend resulting from new services and applications, a lot of the increase also comes at the expense of enterprises investing in their own datacentres. One outcome is that public cloud build is enabling strong growth in ODMs and white-box solutions, so the datacentre infrastructure market is becoming ever more competitive."