New public cloud infrastructure report by Synergy Research Group reveals a rapid rise in hardware and software spending from the public cloud providers.
According to the report, the spending has risen by 32% in the first quarter of 2018 from the first quarter of 2017, following an “unusually strong” start to the year. Synergy said that this is the highest growth achieved in the last nine quarters, during which the growth was generally between 10-20% range.
Typically, the first quarter witnesses a drop off in spending after a strong fourth-quarter. But in the 1Q18, the spending dropped by just 2%.
In the third quarter last year, the total public cloud infrastructure revenue had crossed $10 billion per quarter mark, which has reached over $11 billion in the first quarter this year.
Around 95% of the public cloud infrastructure market share in 1Q18 was held by server, operating systems, storage, networking and virtualization software. Cloud security and cloud management held the remaining 5% market share.
“As we saw in our analysis of Q1 hyperscale capex, the hyperscale operators are on a spending spree and continue to crank up their investment in data centers, with much of this spending flowing through to the vendors of data center hardware and software,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group.
Original design manufacturers (ODMs) dominated the server and storage hardware shipments, holding around 30% of the total market revenue. The traditional market players like Dell EMC, HPE and Cisco held a market share of just 5-10% each in the first quarter. Whereas, Microsoft, Huawei, and VMware grabbed a market share of 3-5% each.
Synergy revealed that Cisco continues to lead the networking segment, despite the robust growth of Arista. Microsoft and VMware dominated the infrastructure software segments.
“Hyperscale operators totally dominate the cloud market, so their ongoing growth bodes well for hardware and software vendors – though ODMs continue to aggressively increase their share of the pie. Our forecasts show that IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and public cloud workloads generally are all going to continue to grow rapidly over the next five years, which will continue to drive ever-increasing levels of spending on data center infrastructure,” added John Dinsdale.
Also read: Global industry cloud spending to reach $22.5 billion in 2018: IDC
