More spent on cloud hardware than traditional infrastructure for the first time - analyst

IDC claims spending on cloud infrastructure made up 50.9 per cent of the market in Q3 last year

Sales from hardware for cloud infrastructure surpassed revenue generated from traditional infrastructure for the first time in Q3 last year, according to IDC.

The analyst said that sales for cloud environments - servers, storage, switches and so on - rose 47.2 per cent year on year to $16.8bn (£13bn).

The growth saw spending on public and private cloud infrastructure equate to 50.9 per cent of the market, with the traditional infrastructure market making up the remaining 49.1 per cent.

Natalya Yezhkova, infrastructure research director at IDC, said: "The first three quarters of 2018 were exceptional for the IT infrastructure market across all deployment environments and the increase in IT infrastructure investments by public cloud datacentres was especially strong, driven by the opening of new datacentres and infrastructure refresh in existing datacentres.

"After such a strong year, we expect some slowdown in 2019 as the overall market cools down and some cloud providers work through adjustments in their supply chain.

"However, IDC expects that the shift in IT infrastructure spending towards cloud environments will continue."

Despite cloud sales taking the lion's share of the market for the first time, traditional infrastructure sales still rose 14.8 per cent in the quarter, and will still account for 52.6 per cent of the market in the whole of 2018.

Meanwhile public cloud spending has more than doubled in the past two years, to $12.1bn, IDC said.

Dell was the largest provider of cloud IT structure in Q3, having seen year-on-year revenue growth of over 50 per cent.