IDC: Cloud Drives EMEA IT Infrastructure

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According to IDC, EMEA IT infrastructure (server, disk storage and ethernet switch) spending for public and private cloud has Q4 2014 revenues worth $1.1 billion with 27% Y-o-Y growth, and around $4.1bn with 28% growth for overall 2014.

Such results lead to the cloud-related share of EMEA infrastructure spending growing to 17% in 2014, up by 3 percentage points from 2013. The cloud also accounts for 32% of total Q4 2014 EMEA storage capacity, a 52% increase over Q3 2013.

IDC EMEA Cloud spending

Thus, the analyst forecasts the market will reach $10.8bn by 2019, or 39% of total market expenditure, making it one of the areas of "tremendous growth" for European infrastructure-- especially compared to an otherwise stagnant (if not declining) traditional market.

W. Europe accounts for 82% of EMEA 2014 cloud business, with cloud investments growing by 19% (up from 15% growth in 2013). Public cloud makes 8% of total investments, a 35% increase over 2013.

“The W. European market for cloud hardware was the fastest growing among the major regions at the end of 2014, and we believe it is still far from maturity,” IDC remarks. “Though in public cloud environments the region is lagging the U.S. and China-— where the largest web players have their roots-—in 2014 it went through a phase of considerable datacenter investments as US multinationals like AWS, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce expanded presence to serve customers with regionally located datacenters, and native service providers fought back with investments of their own.”

Meanwhile CEMA makes 18% of 2014 EMEA cloud investments, with CEE growing at near double the rate of MEA, even if the latter is growing at a "faster double-digit rate" in comparison to 2013.

“Many [CEMA] businesses are reluctant to make the move to public cloud,”  the analyst says. “They opt alternatively for private cloud deployment off-premises, taking advantage of the relative maturity of local hosters.”

Go IDC WW Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker