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COVID-19 played a significant role in the IT infrastructure market during the first quarter of 2020, causing sales revenue of cloud infrastructure to grow slightly and non-cloud infrastructure to fall by double digits.
Vendor revenue from the sales of IT infrastructure for both public and private cloud environments, which includes Ethernet switches, compute and storage platforms, rose by 2.2 per cent year-on-year during 2020Q1.
Meanwhile, traditional, non-cloud infrastructure was nowhere near as successful, declining by 16.3 per cent year-on-year over the same period.
This is according to IDC’s latest update from its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, which claims that both the growth of cloud infrastructure and the decline of non-cloud infrastructure is due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Widespread lockdowns across the world and staged reopening of economies triggered increased demand for cloud-based consumer and business services driving additional demand for server, storage, and networking infrastructure utilised by cloud service provider datacenters,” IDC analysis claimed.
Because of this, public cloud infrastructure saw growth of 6.4 per cent year-on-year, to US$10.1 billion. Private cloud infrastructure however declined by 6.3 per cent year-on-year to US$4.4 billion.
Of the major cloud IT infrastructure vendors, Dell Technologies continued to be on top for revenue performance with US$2.5 billion and market share of 17.4 per cent for the quarter, growing 1 per cent year-on-year.
While HPE and New H3C were in second with US$1.5 billion and 11.9 per cent market share, their revenue growth fell by 11.8 per cent.
They were followed by both Inspur and Inspur Power Systems and Cisco in tied third place, according to IDC. The Inspur businesses saw US$868 million in revenue, representing growth of 36.4 per cent, and 6 per cent market share, while Cisco saw US$847 million in revenue, dropping 18.4 per cent, and holding onto 5.8 per cent market share.
Lenovo rounded out the top five with US$847 million in revenue, growing just 0.5 per cent, and having 4.6 per cent market share.
By the end of the year, private cloud infrastructure spending is expected to return to growth with 1.1 per cent, and public cloud is forecast to ease somewhat, landing on 5.7 per cent.
Of the three market segments, storage platforms are expected to see the fastest growth at 8.1 per cent year-on-year by the end of 2020, to US$24.9 billion, while computing is set for the most spend, reaching US$36.2 billion. Additionally, Ethernet switches have been predicted to grow by 3.7 per cent year-on-year.
The overall spending on cloud is expected to pick up throughout the year, with cloud infrastructure surpassing non-cloud with 54.2 per cent of overall IT infrastructure spending by the end of 2020, representing US$65.9 billion.
This would bring it up past 2019Q4’s 49.7 per cent and is on track to reach 60.5 per cent annually by 2024.
Looking ahead, IDC’s five-year outlook predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 per cent, to US$105.6 billion in 2024, upgrading the public cloud contribution to 67.4 per cent, up from 60.5 per cent from its previous forecast, with a CAGR of 9.5 per cent.
Private cloud growth is expected to grow slightly more with a CAGR of 9.8 per cent over the same period, while non-cloud IT infrastructure will show a slight rebound in 2020, but continue through the five-year CAGR with a decline of 1.6 per cent.
