The growth is driven by growing demand for public cloud services as well as the requirement for richer server configurations, which drove up the average enterprise server price.
Spend on public cloud infrastructure grew by 30%m while the spend on enterprise data centre infrastructure increased by 13%, the latter was affected by the 23% growth in private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure, which helped to offset a small decline in traditional, non-cloud infrastructure.
In terms of market share ODMs make up the largest portion of the public cloud market, with Dell EMC being the leading individual vendor followed by Cisco, HPE and Huawei. The market leader in private cloud is Dell EMC, followed by Microsoft, HPE and Cisco. These same four vendors also led the non-cloud data centre market in a different ranking.
“Cloud service revenues continue to grow by almost 50% per year, enterprise SaaS revenues are growing by 30%, search/social networking revenues are growing by almost 25%, and e-commerce revenues are growing by over 30%, all of which are helping to drive big increases in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “We are also now seeing some reasonably strong growth in enterprise data centre infrastructure spending, with the main catalysts being more complex workloads, hybrid cloud requirements, increased server functionality and higher component costs. We are not seeing much unit volume growth in enterprise, but vendors are benefitting from substantially higher ASPs.”
In terms of revenues, the total data centre infrastructure equipment revenues, including cloud and non-cloud, hardware and software, were $150 billion in 2018 – with public cloud infrastructure accounting for over a third of the total. While private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure making up just over a third of the total.
Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualisation software combined accounted for 96% of the data centre infrastructure market, with the balance comprising network security and management software.
