WW Cloud IT Infrastructure Market Expected Up to 21% at $32 Billion in 2015 – IDC

According to the International Data Corporation Corp.‘s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, total cloud IT infrastructure spending (server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch) will grow by 21% year over year to $32 billion in 2015, accounting for approximately 33% of all IT infrastructure spending, which will be up from about 28% in 2014.

Private cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 16% year over year to $12 billion, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 25% in 2015 to $21 billion.

For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totaled $26.4 billion, up 18.7% year over year from $22.3 billion; private cloud spending was just under $10.0 billion, up 20.7% year over year, while public cloud spending was $16.5 billion, up 17.5% year over year.

For this second quarterly release of cloud IT market forecast, IDC has expanded its worldwide coverage to include detail for eight regions: AsiaPac (excluding Japan), Canada, Central and Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, USA, and Western Europe. In 2015, Western Europe is expected to have the highest growth in cloud IT infrastructure spending at 32%, followed by Latin America (23%), Japan (22%), and the US (21%).

For the five-year forecast period, IDC expects that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a CAGR of 14%; both public cloud and private cloud are expected to grow at the same CAGR. By 2019, IDC expects cloud IT infrastructure spending to be $52 billion, or 45% of total IT infrastructure spend; public cloud will represent about $32 billion of that amount, and private cloud will account for the remaining $20 billion.

“The pace of adoption of cloud-based platforms will not abate for quite some time, resulting in cloud IT infrastructure expansion continuing to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market for the foreseeable future,” said Kuba Stolarski, research manager, server, virtualization and workload research, IDC. “As the market evolves into deploying 3rd Platform solutions and developing next-gen software, organizations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud solutions.”

Taxonomy Notes:
IDC defines cloud services more formally through a checklist of key attributes that an offering must manifest to end users of the service. Public cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise. The public cloud market includes variety of services designed to extend or, in some cases, replace IT infrastructure deployed in corporate datacenters. It also includes content services delivered by a group of suppliers IDC calls Value Added Content Providers (VACP). Private cloud services are shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise (and beyond the control available in public cloud offerings); can be onsite or offsite; and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff. In private cloud that is managed by in-house staff, vendors (cloud service providers) are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups. In this utilization model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the service users.