2019 spending on data centre hardware and software tops $150 bn, driven by public cloud
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that worldwide spend on data centre hardware and software reached $152 billion in 2019, up two per cent from 2018. Within that, spending on public cloud data centre hardware and software grew by seven per cent, while spending on traditional data centre and private cloud fell by one per cent. Public cloud data centre now account for 37 per cent of the total, their share of spending having grown from 25 per cent in 2015. Q4 spending on all data center hardware and software was up seven per cent from Q3, reflecting normal seasonal trends.
The total data centre infrastructure spending data covers both cloud and non-cloud, service provider and enterprise data center, hardware and software. By product the data covers servers, OS, storage, networking, virtualisation software, network security and management software. Servers are the largest product category and accounted for 46 per cent of hardware and software spending in 2019.
Vendor market share ranking in Q4 showed the leaders being Dell, Microsoft, HPE and Cisco. They were followed by Huawei, IBM, VMware, Inspur and Lenovo. In the public cloud segment, ODMs once again accounted for the biggest share of the market. They also benefited from a big year-end spike in shipments to hyperscale operators, thereby enjoying a record quarter.
“Cloud service revenues grew by 39 per cent in 2019, enterprise SaaS revenues grew by 26 per cent, search/social networking revenues grew by 20 per cent, and e-commerce revenues grew by 24 per cent, all of which helped to drive increases in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group.
“Meanwhile, enterprise spending on their own data centres is being crimped by the shift in workloads to public clouds. We are already seeing server shipments to public cloud providers outstripping shipments to enterprises and that trend will continue,” added Dinsdale.
