IT infrastructure spending (server, disk storage and Ethernet switch) for public and private cloud in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) grew 16% year-on-year to reach $1,01-billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2015.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker, the cloud-related share of total EMEA infrastructure expenditure on server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch grew 2 percentage points compared with the same period a year ago to reach 19% in the quarter.
In terms of storage capacity, cloud represented around 33% of total EMEA capacity in 1Q15, with 45% year-on-year growth.
For the scope of this tracker, IDC has tracked the following vendors: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, Oracle, the major ODM vendors, and others.
Looking at the market in euros, EMEA in 1Q15 reported much higher year-on-year revenue growth (around 41%), with total cloud infrastructure investments just shy of €0.9 billion, but the weakening of the euro mitigates this effect in dollar terms.
“IDC expects cloud-related infrastructure spending to reach a yearly value close to $12-billion in EMEA by 2019, or 43% of the total market expenditure, making it an area of tremendous growth for the European infrastructure sector compared with the expectation of a stagnant, if not declining, traditional market,” says Giorgio Nebuloni, associate research director, European Cloud Practice, IDC.
“The unstable macroeconomic conditions that have affected the performance of traditional IT deployments in Western Europe appear to have only marginally impacted cloud adoption, which is still growing albeit at a slower rate, driven by the increasing popularity of cloud service providers and by hybrid cloud adoption at the enterprise level,” says Silvia Cosso, senior research analyst, European Infrastructure, IDC.
“Western European cloud expenditure this quarter was mainly fuelled by public cloud, which grew almost 30% year on year also thanks to the impact of hyperscale data centre installations around the region,” says Michal Vesely, research analyst, European Infrastructure, IDC. “Private cloud expenditure, especially on premises, on the other hand, is more directly connected to regular IT investments by enterprises. Private cloud spending saw a slower pace as users assess their storage, as well as integrated and hyperconverged systems, strategies. Once decisions are made, we expect another major push in the forthcoming period.”
The emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) took 14% of EMEA cloud investments in 1Q15. This is a strong decrease compared with the same quarter last year, when CEMA accounted for 17%. Challenging macroeconomic conditions in Russia and weaker investments in the public cloud segment were the main reasons for the decline.
“However, the private cloud model is seeing increased investments from both private and public sectors as many CIOs recognize the benefits of higher flexibility provided by cloud technology,” says Jiri Helebrand, research manager, Systems and Infrastructure Solutions, IDC CEMA.
Cloud infrastructure spending in the CEMA region is estimated to be 11% of the total addressable server, storage, and networking hardware market, with public cloud accounting for about 40% of this.