Cloud market spins up a cyclone of sales

Server, storage and switch sales surge 25 per cent, says IDC

Happy days, hardware-sellers, box-peering-abacus-wielder IDC says sales of cloudy kit surged by a whopping 25 per cent in 2015's first quarter.

The analyst outfit's Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker found that sales of infrastructure-grade servers, storage and ethernet switches grew by 25.1% year over year to nearly US$6.3 billion in the first quarter of 2015.

Cloud infrastructure spend now accounts for over 30 per cent of all IT infrastructure spend, the analyst says. And public clouds are doing most of the spending, accounting for $3.9 billion compared to $2.4 billion for on-premises bit barns.

If IDC's right, no wonder the “ODM direct” and “Others” categories in the table below include such big numbers: public cloud operators prefer to buy direct from the likes of Quanta and Inspur, bypassing the channel and therefore making it harder for any analyst to name names. With hyperscale operators also doing their own design, and their own racking and stacking, the surge in sales is not therefore good news for everybody.

Top 5 Corporate Family, Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Vendor Revenue, Market Share, and Year-Over-Year Growth, First Quarter of 2015 (Revenues are in Millions, Excludes Double Counting of Storage and Servers)

Vendor	1Q15 Revenue	1Q15 Market Share	1Q14 Revenue	1Q14 Market Share	1Q15/1Q14 Revenue Growth
1. HP	$985	15.7%	$716	14.3%	37.4%
2. Dell	$745	11.9%	$555	11.1%	34.2%
3. Cisco	$582	9.3%	$447	8.9%	30.1%
4. EMC	$450	7.2%	$365	7.3%	23.5%
5. NetApp	$273	4.4%	$269	5.4%	1.5%
5. Lenovo	$226	3.6%	$26	0.5%	770.3%
ODM Direct	$1,808	28.8%	$1,468	29.3%	23.1%
Others	$1,207	19.2%	$1,170	23.3%	3.1%
Total	$6,276	100%	$5,017	100%	25.1%

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, July 2015

IDC says the cloud infrastructure market is also outgrowing the conventional infrastructure market handily – the latter grew but at just 6.1 per cent in this quarter. Among that growth, only servers did well as storage sales fell and switches climbed an anaemic one per cent. It's tempting to say the competing fortunes of servers and storage signal that Server SANS and/or virtual storage are taking off, and therefore making cloud-like kit more common in private clouds. ®