Beancounters at IDC think that spending on private clouds is about to increase as the world starts to lose interest in public cloud offerings.
IDC said that Cloud IT infrastructure revenues fell below the volume that headed into more traditional environments in the fourth quarter of last year.
The channel has already encountered many customers that have become disillusioned with the public cloud, mainly because they failed to foresee the costs involved, and has been providing ‘unclouding’ services to get user data and applications back into an on-prem environment.
IDC noted that quarterly spending on public cloud It infrastructure, which includes server, storage, and Ethernet switches, dropping by 6.9 percent. That contrasted with private cloud growth of 19.6 percent
Public cloud spending still dominates the IT infrastructure market, but there were indications from IDC that it peaked last year at 69.6 percent.
Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director, infrastructure systems, platforms, and technologies said:” “The unprecedented growth of the infrastructure systems market in 2018 was shared across both cloud and non-cloud segments.”
It was always going to be a challenge matching the performance of 2018, where sales of IT infrastructure products for all cloud environments improved by 28 percent year-on-year in Q4 to hit sales of $16.8 billion. IDC thinks that there will be a growth of six percent.
“As market participants prepare for a difficult growth comparison in 2019, compounded by strong, cyclical, macroeconomic headwinds, cloud IT infrastructure will be the primary growth engine supporting overall market performance until the next cyclical refresh. With new on-premises public cloud stacks entering the picture, there is a distinct possibility of a significant surge in private cloud deployments over the next five years”, Stolarski said.
