According to Gartner, global public cloud services revenues are to total $186.4 billion in 2018-- a 21.4% increase over 2017 revenues worth $153.5 billion.

The fastest growing segment is IaaS, forecast to grow 35.9% in 2018 to reach $40.8bn. The analyst expects the top 10 public cloud providers to account for around 70% of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50% in 2016. Such dominance of hyperscale IaaS providers creates both "enormous" opportunities and challenges to market participants, since while it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organisations need to be careful of providers gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market. In addition, organisations should demand simpler ways to move workloads, applications and data across IaaS offerings without penalties.

According to IDC, total spending on infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage and ethernet swtiches) deployed in cloud environments will total $53.3 billion in 2018, a 10.9% increase over 2017.

Public cloud datacentres account for the majority of spending (65.9%) with the fastest annual growth rate of 11.3%. Off-premises private cloud datacentres make 13% of cloud infrastructure spending with 12% growth, while on-premises private clouds account for 61.7% of spending with 9.1% growth in 2018.

In a bid to accelerate enterprise AI and IoT application development on the Azure platform Microsoft announces a strategic partnership with IoT analytics specialist C3 IoT.

The deal has the two companies work on a "better together" solution fully integrating the C3 IoT Platform-- a low-code PaaS for scaling AI and IoT across enterprises-- to work on Microsoft Azure. The two companies will also conduct co-marketing and co-selling strategies to scale distribution globally, while offering training to speed customer time to value.

According to IDC, private and public cloud infrastructure product (server, storage and ethernet switch) revenues total $12.8 billion in Q4 2017, a 27.3% Y-o-Y increase.

Full-year 2017 revenues also see double-digit growth of 21.7% to reach $43.4bn. CEE sees the fastest growth within the EMEA region at 34.1%. MEA follows at 27.5%, while W. European growth is at 16.6%.