FRAMINGHAM, Mass., October 1, 2015 – According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 25.7% year over year to $6.9 billion in the second quarter of 2015 (2Q15). The overall share of cloud IT infrastructure sales climbed to 31.4% in 2Q15, up from 26.0% a year ago. Revenue from infrastructure sales to private cloud grew by 19.5% to $2.8 billion, and to public cloud by 30.4% to $4.1 billion. In comparison, revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased by -3.5% year over year in the second quarter, with declines in all three technology segments (servers, storage and Ethernet switch). All three technology markets showed strong year-over-year growth in both private and public cloud segments, with Ethernet switches experiencing the highest growth in private cloud at 30.1% and servers with the highest growth in public cloud at 36.6%.

"Cloud IT deployments continue to drive overall IT infrastructure growth, as customers modernize their workload portfolios onto a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios," said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Servers and Hyperscale Infrastructure at IDC. "As cloud service providers continue to expand their datacenter footprints to meet growing cloud services demand, customers increasingly rely on a variety of as-a-service offerings and traditional hosting to help meet the performance, manageability, time to deployment, and TCO requirements of their organizations. Both private and public clouds will continue to see growing demand from customers who look to optimize their workload deployments based on their own uniquely varied requirements."

At the regional level, vendor revenues from cloud IT infrastructure sales grew fastest in Japan at 64.8% year over year, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at 49.9%, Canada at 40.0%, and USA at 23.5%. Central and Eastern Europe declined at -18.0% year over year, as the region continues to go through political and economic turmoil, which impacts overall IT spending.

Top 5 Corporate Family, Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Vendor Revenue, Second Quarter of 2015 (Revenues are in Millions, Excludes double counting of storage and servers)

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, October 2015

Notes:

• Lenovo and NetApp both ranked #5 in a statistical tie. IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide cloud IT infrastructure market when there is less than one percent difference in the revenue share of two or more vendors.

** IBM's divestiture of its x86 business to Lenovo on October 1, 2014 has a highly positive impact on year over year comparisons for Lenovo for 2Q15.

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IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is designed to provide clients with a better understanding of what portion of the server, disk storage systems, and networking hardware markets are being deployed in cloud environments. This tracker will break out vendors' revenue by the hardware technology market into public and private cloud environments for historical data and also provide a five-year forecast by the technology market.

Taxonomy Notes:

IDC defines cloud services more formally through a checklist of key attributes that an offering must manifest to end users of the service. Public cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise. The public cloud market includes variety of services designed to extend or, in some cases, replace IT infrastructure deployed in corporate datacenters. It also includes content services delivered by a group of suppliers IDC calls Value Added Content Providers (VACP). Private cloud services are shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise (and beyond the control available in public cloud offerings); can be onsite or offsite; and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff. In private cloud that is managed by in-house staff, "vendors (cloud service providers)" are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups. In this utilization model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the "service users."