Data Center Spending Grew 17% in 2018

Global spending on data center hardware and software grew by 17 percent in 2018, according to Synergy Research Group.

Spending on public cloud infrastructure grew by 30 percent, while spending on enterprise data center infrastructure grew by 13 percent, the latter driven by 23 percent growth in private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure, Synergy researchers say.

ODMs in aggregate account for the largest portion of the public cloud market, with Dell EMC being the leading individual vendor, followed by Cisco, HPE and Huawei.

The 2018 market leader in private cloud was Dell EMC, followed by Microsoft, HPE and Cisco. The same four vendors led in the non-cloud data center market, though with a different ranking.

source: Synergy Research Group

Total data center infrastructure equipment revenues, including both cloud and non-cloud, hardware and software, were $150 billion in 2018, with public cloud infrastructure accounting for well over a third of the total.

Private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure accounted for a little over a third of the total. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 96 percent of the data center infrastructure market, with the balance comprising network security and management software, says Synergy.

“Cloud service revenues continue to grow by almost 50 percent per year, enterprise SaaS revenues are growing by 30 percent, search/social networking revenues are growing by almost 25 percent, and e-commerce revenues are growing by over 30 percent, all of which are helping to drive big increases in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst.