It looks like cloud technology is the major interruption factor in the EMEA infrastructure hardware market, accounting for a growing portion of hardware spending and exerting influence on hardware architectures and vendors, says a new International Data Corporation (IDC).
The study represents the usage of infrastructure hardware elements in different types of cloud environments in EMEA, including on-premises private clouds, hosted private clouds, and hosted public clouds. It includes historical data for cloud hardware spending in 2011 – 2013 and forecast data for 2014 – 2018.
People will be investing in hardware for cloud environments in EMEA worth more than $4 billion by the end of this year, with a strong 19 percent annual growth. 15 percent of the infrastructure spend in EMEA will be related to cloud environments in 2014, against only 8 percent in 2011. It is expected to increase to more than 22 percent in 2018.
“Along with Big Data, social, and mobility, cloud represents one of the four pillars of IDC’s 3rd Platform vision – the new paradigm of IT usage that is revolutionizing the way technology is adopted in commercial and consumer environments,” says Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager, IDC EMEA Enterprise Server Group.
“The rise of cloud has triggered a revolution in the hardware market. While white-box and few large OEMs fight to absorb the surge in demand for public cloud, most incumbent hardware players invest heavily in offerings enabling on-premises and hosted private cloud environments, such as integrated systems, high-end networks, and high-performance storage.”
“In the longer term, IDC expects greater adoption of hybrid cloud with benefits for both private and public consumption. Hybrid cloud allows customers to retain sensitive data behind a corporate firewall while still taking advantage of cloud-related lower costs,” says Mohammed Hefny, senior research analyst, IDC EMEA systems.
The study also says that the cloud hardware penetration will vary mainly by country, and it is more advanced in Western Europe than in emerging EMEA markets. In northern Europe, hosted private and public cloud deployments have been accelerated over the past two years, driven by large multinational providers especially in business to consumer environments.
