Cloud fueled data center spending growth to $150b in 2018

Synergy Research Group (SRG) says a 30% spike in public cloud spending the data center hardware and software market grow to $150 billion in 2018. In addition, the requirement for ever-richer server configurations also drove up enterprise server average selling prices.

Spending on enterprise data center infrastructure grew by 13% in part driven by the 23% growth in private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure, which helped to offset a marginal decline in traditional, non-cloud infrastructure.

In terms of market share, ODMs in aggregate account for the largest portion of the public cloud market, with Dell EMC being the leading individual vendor, followed by Cisco, HPE and Huawei. The 2018 market leader in private cloud was Dell EMC, followed by Microsoft, HPE and Cisco.

Private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure accounted for a little over a third of the total. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 96% of the data center infrastructure market, with the balance comprising network security and management software.

“Cloud service revenues continue to grow by almost 50% per year, enterprise SaaS revenues are growing by 30%, search/social networking revenues are growing by almost 25%, and e-commerce revenues are growing by over 30%, all of which are helping to drive big increases in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

“We are also now seeing some reasonably strong growth in enterprise data center infrastructure spending, with the main catalysts being more complex workloads, hybrid cloud requirements, increased server functionality and higher component costs,” added Dinsdale.