Public cloud drives double digit growth of IT infrastructure revenues

The worldwide cloud IT infrastructure market is in good stead following widespread adoption of public cloud.

This is according to the International Data Corporation, who reports vendor revenue from sale of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT including public and private to have grown 27.3 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), reaching US$12.8 billion.

For the whole of 2017, combined public and private cloud deployments continued their healthy double-digit annual growth experienced in the past few years with revenues reaching $43.4 billion for 21.7 percent year-over-year growth.

IDC says public cloud infrastructure is one of the main drivers of this growth after almost doubling in the past two years to reach $8.5 billion in 2017, growing 34 percent year over year in 4Q17.

Private cloud also experienced growth albeit at a slower rate, reaching $4.3 billion with an annual increase of 15.7 percent. Total worldwide cloud IT infrastructure revenue in 2017 more than doubled when compared to 2013.

Cloud computing has certainly imposed its dominance upon the IT world with combined public and private cloud now accounting for 42.2 percent of the total worldwide IT infrastructure spending, up a whopping 39.3 percent from just a year ago.

Traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure revenue grew 12.8 percent from a year ago, although it has been generally declining over the past several years. At $17.5 billion in 4Q17 it still represents 57.8 percent of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending.

Share of the market was relatively spread out with Dell holding the largest piece of the pie followed by HPE, Cisco, Huawei and IBM.

"2017 finished strong for public cloud IT infrastructure growth, led by continued expansion by Amazon and renewed growth in Google and Facebook infrastructure," says IDC computing platforms research director Kuba Stolarski.

"While there has been high growth in all IT infrastructure segments lately, public cloud, led by the hyperscalers, has resulted in the largest share of infrastructure growth, which is expected to continue at this pace for at least a few more quarters."

Narrowing it down to global regions, not one area saw a decline. Latin America and Japan saw the slowest revenue rise with 6.2 percent and 4.8 percent respectively from a year ago. All other regions grew their cloud IT infrastructure revenue by double digits.

Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) saw the fastest growth rates at 59 percent and 34.1 percent respectively. Canada (23.3 percent), Middle East - Africa (MEA) (27.5 percent) and USA (21.1 percent) had annual growth in the twenties, while Western Europe (16.6 percent) had annual growth in the teens.