Cloud IT Infrastructure Accounted for Nearly 1/3 Global Server, Others Switch Spending 3Q2014

New data for the third quarter of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker,  2014 (3Q14) shows that almost a third of combined worldwide server, disk storage, and ethernet switch infrastructure spending in the quarter came from cloud deployments.

In the report, total cloud infrastructure revenue for the quarter grew 16% year over year to $6.5 billion.

Meanwhile, public cloud infrastructure accounted for nearly half of total cloud infrastructure revenue and is growing faster at 18% compared to one year ago.

“Public and private clouds represent the ‘compute factories’ and ‘digital content depots’ of the 3rd Platform era,” noted Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacenter and Cloud research at IDC. “Whether internally owned or ‘rented’ from a service provider, cloud environments are strategic assets that organizations of all types must rely upon to quickly introduce new services of unprecedented scale, speed, and scope. Their effective use will garner first-mover advantage to any organization in a hyper-competitive market.”

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is designed to provide clients with a better understanding of what portion of the server, disk storage systems, and networking hardware markets are being deployed in cloud environments.

This tracker will break out vendors’ revenue by the hardware technology market into public and private cloud environments for historical data and also provide a five-year forecast by the technology market.

“This new Tracker will greatly help our clients to better navigate and perform competitive analysis for the cloud environment,” said Lidice Fernandez, Program Vice President of Worldwide Tracker Research at IDC. “This is the best way IDC can help vendors target their go-to-market efforts for the 3rd Platform marketplace era.”

IDC defines cloud services more formally through a checklist of key attributes that an offering must manifest to end users of the service.

Public cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise.

The public cloud market includes variety of services designed to extend or, in some cases, replace IT infrastructure deployed in corporate datacenters.

It also includes content services delivered by a group of suppliers IDC calls Value Added Content Providers (VACP).

Private cloud services are shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise (and beyond the control available in public cloud offerings); can be onsite or offsite; and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff.

In private cloud that is managed by in-house staff, “vendors (cloud service providers)” are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups.

In this utilization model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the “service users.”‎