Cloud IT Infrastructure Market Grows by 25.1% in the First Quarter - IDC

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, v endor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 25.1% year over year to nearly $6.3 billion in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15).

This was the second highest growth in the five quarters in which IDC has tracked year over year revenue and the second largest in terms of total spending in nine quarters of tracking.

Cloud IT infrastructure spending climbed to nearly 30% of overall IT infrastructure spending in 1Q15, up from 26.4% a year ago. Revenue from infrastructure sales for private cloud grew 24.4% year over year to $2.4 billion while sales for public cloud grew 25.5% to $3.9 billion. In comparison, the non-cloud IT infrastructure segment increased by 6.1% in the first quarter, largely driven by increased sales of servers while storage sales declined and sales of Ethernet switches grew just by 1%. All three technology markets showed strong year-over-year growth in both private and public cloud segments, with servers experiencing the highest growth at 28% and 33%, respectively.

"Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms," said Kuba Stolarski, Research Manager, Server, Virtualization and Workload Research at IDC.

 "Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernize their IT for the 3rd Platform, begin to deploy next-gen software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms."

At the regional level, vendor revenues from cloud IT infrastructure sales declined only in Central and Eastern Europe, which is experiencing political and economic turmoil that impacts overall IT spending. In all other regions year-over-year growth in IT infrastructure sales for public and private cloud remained strong and even accelerated compared to growth rates in the previous quarter.

Global Messaging Traffic set for Explosion

Mobile and online messaging traffic will reach 160 trillion messages per annum by 2019, up from 94.2 trillion this year. This equates to approximately 438 billion messages sent and received by users on a daily basis by 2019.

These global figures incorporate SMS, multimedia messaging service, instant messaging (IM), social media and e-mail.

This is according to a recent report by Juniper Research – Sending Out An SMS – which focuses on the latest developments in the mobile ecosystem.

The report notes last year, e-mail accounted for the largest share of traffic, at around 35 trillion messages per year – although almost 80% of this figure (28 trillion) can be categorised as spam.

Within the next 12 months, IM will overtake e-mail, generating almost 43 trillion messages annually, says Juniper Research.

However, the research discovered enterprises continue to regard application-to-person (A2P) SMS as more reliable and secure than IM for services such as verification and notification. This will drive A2P revenue to more than $70 billion by 2019, up from $62.8 billion this year.

Steffen Sorrell, senior analyst at Juniper Research, says A2P will prove popular in the next few years, as financial institutions and other services require a secure way to send notifications and verification messages.

While SMS revenue as a whole will see a decline, A2P SMS will go against this trend and see an increase in returns, says Juniper Research.

"With the large growth in the A2P SMS space, an over the top (OTT) form of A2P which offers secure message delivery could prove to be a money-spinner," Sorell says.

He points out IM will continue to prove popular with consumers, although OTT providers need to find monetisation solutions. "They have huge figures in terms of traffic, but comparatively low figures in terms of revenue."