Global cloud IT infra mkt up 25% to $6.3 bn in Q1:IDC

Strong demand boosted sales of infrastructure products like server, storage and ethernet switches for global cloud IT by 25.1 per cent year-on-year to USD 6.27 billion in the first quarter of 2015, research firm IDC has said. The industry segment had an estimated revenue of USD 5.01 billion in January-March quarter of 2014. Cloud computing facilitates sharing of technological resources, software and digital information.

It operates on a pay-per-use model, helping companies to cut costs as they do not have to invest heavily in infrastructure. According to various industry reports, public and private cloud services is expected to be a multi-billion opportunity for IT firms as clients move to the cloud to host their data and applications to become more agile and increase cost efficiencies. Public IT cloud services spending alone are estimated to grow to more than USD 127 billion in 2018.

Interestingly, cloud accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the overall spending on IT infrastructure in the January-March 2015 period, up from 26.4 per cent a year ago, IDC said in a statement. This is the second-highest growth in five quarters (in which IDC has tracked y-o-y revenue) and the second-largest in terms of total spending in nine quarters of tracking. "Revenue from infrastructure sales for private cloud grew by 24.4 per cent y-o-y to USD 2.4 billion," IDC said.

On the other hand, sales for public cloud grew 25.5 per cent to USD 3.9 billion. "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," IDC Research Manager (Server, Virtualisation and Workload Research) Kuba Stolarski said. 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 modernise their IT, Stolarski added.

According to IDC, HP led the tally with 15.7 per cent share of this market, followed by Dell (11.9 per cent), Cisco (9.3 per cent) and EMC (7.2 per cent).