Cloud infrastructure vendors saw double-digit revenue growth in every region in the world tracked by research house IDC in the last quarter of 2018.
But 2019 will be a starkly different story, the Massachusetts-based firm said, in part due to cyclical spending cycles; in part to macroeconomic headwinds. (The data is based on sales of servers, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches).
A new report shows revenue growth was the fastest in Canada at 67.2 percent year over year, with China growing at a rate of 54.4 percent. Other regions among the fastest growing in Q4 included Western Europe (39.7 percent), Latin America (37.9 percent) and Japan (34.9%). US growth was 15.5 percent, IDC said.
“The unprecedented growth of the infrastructure systems market in 2018 was shared across both cloud and non-cloud segments,” said Kuba Stolarski, research director, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies at IDC.
He added: “As market participants prepare for a very difficult growth comparison in 2019, compounded by strong, cyclical, macroeconomic headwinds, cloud IT infrastructure will be the primary growth engine supporting overall market performance until the next cyclical refresh.”
“With new on-premises public cloud stacks entering the picture, there is a distinct possibility of a significant surge in private cloud deployments over the next five years.”
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Long-term, IDC expects spending on cloud IT infrastructure to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent, reaching $99.9 billion in 2023 and accounting for 59.5 percent of total IT infrastructure spend.
“Public cloud datacenters will account for 68.3 percent of this amount, growing at an 10.4 percent CAGR. Spending on private cloud infrastructure will grow at a CAGR of 12 percent.”
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, grew 28 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2018 (4Q18), reaching $16.8 billion.
For 2018, annual spending (vendor revenue plus channel mark-up) on public and private cloud IT infrastructure totaled $66.1 billion, slightly higher (1.3%) than forecast in Q3 2018
