Tag: Synergy

Skies the limit for cloud spending

According to Synergy Research Group, fourth-quarter enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services surpassed $61 billion, a rise of 21 per cent during the same period last year.

However, the increase was substantially dampened by the strong US dollar and a severely restricted Chinese market.

Synergy said that the US Q4 growth rate was 27 per cent, which compares with an average growth rate of 31 per cent in the previous four quarters.

The market tracker explained that the shrink in growth rate was partly to be expected due to the increasingly massive scale of the market, but added there is no doubt the current economic climate also had an adverse impact.

Big tech owns most of the cloud

Amazon, Microsoft and Google own more than 76 percent of the enterprise cloud services market in the United States and that anti-competitive state is likely to deteriorate,

IT market research firm Synergy Research Group said American enterprises’ annual spend on cloud infrastructure services was now approaching a significant milestone.

Synergy Research Group chief analyst John Dinsdale said that US spending on cloud services was approaching a $100 billion annual run rate and continues to grow by 30 percent per year, which was unusual for such a large IT market.

Over the past 14 quarters, the US year-over-year growth rate for cloud services has been between 27 percent to 34 percent and the growth is being led by Microsoft, Amazon’s cloud business—Amazon Web Services (AWS)—and Google’s cloud arm Google Cloud, he said.

Public cloud reigns supreme

Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operator and vendor revenues surged 26 percent to total $126 billion during the first quarter of 2022.

New numbers freshly crunched by Synergy Research Group said the biggest growth was seen in IaaS and PaaS, with Q1 revenues jumping 36 percent to reach more than $44 billion.

In the other service segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $54 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 21 percent from last year.

Synergy Group found that to support both these and other digital services, public cloud providers splashed out $28 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 20 per cent from Q1 2021.

Across the whole public cloud ecosystem, companies that featured the most prominently were Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

Datacentre market slows

Big snail in Old TaipeiThe datacentre market began to lose momentum in Q1 as the COVID-19 crisis halted hardware spending in the enterprise space according to a report from Synergy Research Group.

In a freshly baked report  Synergy said that software spending declined by two percent globally in the first quarter to $35.8 billion.

The Q1 decline was driven by a sharp drop in enterprise and service provider spending, which fell by four per cent during the quarter to $22.5 billion, Synergy wrote.

Public cloud spending, however, helped abate the decline, growing by three per cent. The company said that COVID-19 pandemic has had “little impact” on the public cloud datacentre infrastructure market.

It follows several consecutive quarters of growth in datacentre spending. Synergy claims that datacentre hardware and software spending grew by two percent in 2019, with public cloud up by seven per cent and traditional datacentre spending down by seven percent.

Datacentres continue to consolidate

Data centre Beancounters at Synergy Research claim that the value of data centre mergers and acquisitions doubled to $20 billion last year.

Synergy thinks that this is all down to service providers dumping facilities in favour of public cloud and co-location agreements.

It claimed that there was at least one “significant” deal secured every week last year, with datacentre giants Equinix and Digital Realty among those splashing the most cash.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy, said the datacentre M&A activity was being driven by enterprises focusing more on improving IT capabilities and less on owning datacentre assets.

“That shift is driving huge growth in outsourcing, whether it is via cloud services, use of colocation facilities, or sale and leaseback of datacentres.

“The dramatic growth of cloud providers is also driving changes in the data centre industry, as data centre operators strive to help them rapidly increasing in scale and global footprint. We expect to see much more datacentre M&A over the next five years.”

On top of the $20 billion that changed hands last year, four deals worth a combined $2.6 billion have been confirmed but not yet completed.

The mass sales marked the reversal of a trend from five years ago when integrators and telcos were pouring investments into their facilities.

 

Synergy Research sees datacentre equipment spending fall

datacenterTraditional non-cloud datacentre equipment spending has plunged by 18 percent in the last two years according to new research.

Beancounters at Synergy Research have added up some numbers and divided by their collective shoe size and worked out that datacentre spending is now dominated by cloud.

Spending on public and private cloud datacentre equipment has grown to about two thirds of the total market.

Total datacentre infrastructure equipment revenues hit $30 billion in the second quarter of 2017, with public cloud infrastructure accounting for over 30 percent of the total and private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure accounting for over a third.

The public cloud has grown by 35 percent and private cloud by 16 percent over the last two years, traditional non-cloud datacentre hardware and software spending has dropped by 18 percent.

Synergy said the main beneficiaries of this market shift are the Asian ODMs, which in aggregate account for the largest portion of the public cloud market, its figures show. Cisco is the leading individual vendor in the public cloud space, followed by Dell EMC and HPE.

Dell EMC leads the private cloud segment followed by HPE and Microsoft, a trio which also control the declining non-cloud datacentre market.

Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale said: cloud service revenues continued to grow by over 40 percent per year, enterprise SaaS revenue growing by over 30 percent, and search/social networking revenues growing by over 20 percent.

“It is little wonder that this is all pulling through continued strong growth in spending on public cloud infrastructure. While some of this is essentially spend resulting from new services and applications, a lot of the increase also comes at the expense of enterprises investing in their own datacentres. One outcome is that public cloud build is enabling strong growth in ODMs and white-box solutions, so the datacentre infrastructure market is becoming ever more competitive,” he said.

Dell mocks HPE’s composing efforts

Larry_Nickel_composing_in_2004HP Enterprises composing efforts were dubbed a minor effort which will soon b flat, by Dell.

HPE this week unveiled plans to release the new composable architecture early next year. It’s being called Synergy, and HPE CEO Meg Whitman claimed the product was revolutionary.

We were suspicious because it involved the non-word Synergy and the word composable which keeps getting underlined by our word processor as being made up.  Tech companies use the word synergy and made up words when they are describing a non-event and hope that managers will nod when they see the outfit is talking jargon.

Dell also slagged off HPE’s new “composable” Synergy architecture, saying the new infrastructure product is impractical, expensive and doomed to be one of the IT market’s “derelict big ideas”.

Writing in his Dell bog, Dell fellow Robert Hormuth attacked the idea of composable infrastructure and the fact that it is “being driven by a single company”.

Hormuth said punters don’t want their infrastructure composable. They want approaches that work across many vendors and many technologies.

“Organisations require solutions that are simple, inexpensive, agile and scalable over proprietary, monolithic and expensive,” he said.

He said that the HP idea was only supported by HP. It is not open so it lacks flexibility and choice. “We’re looking forward to the evolution of standards-based approaches for composable infrastructure – which will inevitably increase customer choices and leverage expertise by controlling cost. After all, the marketplace is littered with derelict big ideas that were pushed by a single enterprise technology vendor. Right now, composable infrastructure could be one of those big ideas.”

Hormuth, in his blog post, touted Dell’s Active System Manager architecture as more practical, affordable and flexible than composable infrastructure.

HPE Vice President Paul Miller told  CRN, “If you don’t have a composable infrastructure yet, then of course it is not practical for you to sell one. What is not practical about having a system that gives you fluid pools of compute, storage and fabric, that enables you to stand up infrastructure for a workload in three minutes or less?”

The new HPE architecture is being billed as the first ever designed to bridge traditional and cloud-native applications into fluid resource pools that can be deployed at “cloud speed.” That could eliminate the big advantage that Amazon Web Services has had over internal IT departments that have struggled to provision workloads instantly like AWS can.