Cloud drives growth in EMEA IT infrastructure spending

According to the newly introduced EMEA data portion of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker, IT infrastructure spending (server, disk storage, and ethernet switch) for public and private cloud in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew by 27% to reach $1.1 billion in revenue in 4Q14 and totaled around $4.1 billion for the whole year, with 28% growth over 2013.

The cloud-related share of total EMEA infrastructure expenditure on server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch grew by 3 percentage points to exceed 17% in 2014.

In terms of storage capacity, cloud represented around 32% of total EMEA capacity in 4Q14, with 52% growth over the same period a year before.

For the scope of this tracker, IDC has tracked the following vendors: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, the major ODM vendors, and others.

IDC expects this market to reach a value of $10.8 billion by 2019, or 39% of the total market expenditure, representing one of the areas of tremendous growth for the European infrastructure sector, compared to the expectation of a stagnant, if not declining, traditional market.

The emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, captured 18% of EMEA cloud investments in 2014. Despite that the fact that the value in CEE was near double that of MEA, the latter is growing at a faster double-digit rate, in comparison to 2013.

Cloud infrastructure spending in the region is estimated to be 12% from the total addressable server, storage and networking hardware market. Public cloud is still below half of this share.

“Many businesses are reluctant to make the move to public cloud,” said Mohamed Hefny, senior research analyst, Systems and Infrastructure Solutions, IDC CEMA. “They opt alternatively for private cloud deployment off-premises, taking advantage of the relative maturity of local hosters.”

Staff Writer