FRAMINGHAM, Mass., January 11, 2018 – According to the International Data Corporation (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 25.5% year over year in the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17), reaching $11.3 billion.

Public cloud infrastructure revenue grew 32.3% year over year in 3Q17 to $7.7 billion and now represents 30.2% of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending, up from 26.3% one year ago. Private cloud revenue reached $3.6 billion for an annual increase of 13.1%. Total worldwide cloud IT infrastructure revenue is on pace to nearly double in 2017 when compared to 2013. Traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure revenue grew 8.0% from a year ago, although it has been generally declining over the past several years; despite the declining trend, at $14.2 billion in 3Q17 traditional IT still represents 55.6% of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending.

Public cloud also represented 68.0% of the total cloud IT infrastructure revenue in 3Q17. The market with the highest growth in the public cloud infrastructure segment was Storage Platforms with revenue up 45.1% compared to the same quarter of the previous year, and making up 42.0% of the revenue in public cloud. Compute Platforms and Ethernet Switch public cloud IT infrastructure revenues were up 24.8% and 23.2%, respectively. Compute Platforms represented 43.9% of public cloud IT infrastructure revenue. Private cloud infrastructure revenue was driven by the Storage Platforms growth of 16.1% year over year.

"2017 has been a strong year for public cloud IT infrastructure growth, accelerating throughout the year," said Kuba Stolarski, research director for Computing P latforms at IDC. "While hyperscalers such as Amazon and Google are driving the lion's share of the growth, IDC is seeing strong growth in the lower tiers of public cloud and continued growth in private cloud on a worldwide scale. In the near term, new Intel and AMD platforms released during 2017 should aid in refresh and infrastructure expansion throughout the cloud IT infrastructure segment."

Except for Latin America revenue, which grew 5.0% from a year ago, all other regions in the world grew their cloud IT Infrastructure revenue by double digits. Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) saw the fastest growth rates at 50.1% and 35.3%, respectively. Canada (22.5%) and Western Europe (24.6%) had annual growth in the twenties, while the U.S. (18.7%), Japan (17.5%), and Middle East & Africa (MEA) (15.8%) had annual growth in the teens.

Top Companies, Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Vendor Revenue, Market Share, and Year-Over-Year Growth, Q3 2017 (Revenues are in Millions)

IDC's Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, Q3 2017 January 11, 2018

Notes:

*IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide cloud IT infrastructure market when there is a difference of one percent or less in the vendor revenue shares among two or more vendors.

**Due to the existing joint venture between HPE and the New H3C Group, IDC will be reporting external market share on a global level for HPE as "HPE/New H3C Group" starting from Q2 2016 and going forward.

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 breaks out each vendors' revenue by the hardware technology market into public and private cloud environments for historical data and provides 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."

IDC defines Compute Platforms as compute intensive servers. Storage Platforms includes storage intensive servers as well as external storage and storage expansion (JBOD) systems. Storage intensive servers are defined based on high storage media density. Servers with low storage density are defined as compute intensive systems. Storage Platforms does not include internal storage media from compute intensive servers. There is no overlap in revenue between Compute Platforms and Storage Platforms, in contrast with IDC’s Server Tracker and Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, which include overlaps in portions of revenue associated with server-based storage.