In terms of storage capacity, cloud represented around 33% of total EMEA capacity in 1Q15, with 45% year-on-year growth.
For the scope of this tracker, IDC has tracked the following vendors: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, Oracle, the major ODM vendors, and others.
Looking at the market in euros, EMEA in 1Q15 reported much higher YoY revenue growth (around 41%), with total cloud infrastructure investments just shy of €0.9 billion, but the weakening of the euro mitigates this effect in dollar terms.
"IDC expects cloud-related infrastructure spending to reach a yearly value close to $12 billion in EMEA by 2019, or 43% of the total market expenditure, making it an area of tremendous growth for the European infrastructure sector compared with the expectation of a stagnant, if not declining, traditional market," said Giorgio Nebuloni, associate research director, European Cloud Practice, IDC.
Regional Highlights
"The unstable macroeconomic conditions that have affected the performance of traditional IT deployments in Western Europe appear to have only marginally impacted cloud adoption, which is still growing albeit at a slower rate, driven by the increasing popularity of cloud service providers and by hybrid cloud adoption at the enterprise level," said Silvia Cosso, senior research analyst, European Infrastructure, IDC.
"Western European cloud expenditure this quarter was mainly fueled by public cloud, which grew almost 30% year on year also thanks to the impact of hyperscale datacenter installations around the region," said Michal Vesely, research analyst, European Infrastructure, IDC. "Private cloud expenditure, especially on premises, on the other hand, is more directly connected to regular IT investments by enterprises. Private cloud spending saw a slower pace as users assess their storage, as well as integrated and hyperconverged systems, strategies. Once decisions are made, we expect another major push in the forthcoming period."
The emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) took 14% of EMEA cloud investments in 1Q15. This is a strong decrease compared with the same quarter last year, when CEMA accounted for 17%. Challenging macroeconomic conditions in Russia and weaker investments in the public cloud segment were the main reasons for the decline.
"However, the private cloud model is seeing increased investments from both private and public sectors as many CIOs recognize the benefits of higher flexibility provided by cloud technology," said Jiri Helebrand, research manager, Systems and Infrastructure Solutions, IDC CEMA.
Cloud infrastructure spending in the CEMA region is estimated to be 11% of the total addressable server, storage, and networking hardware market, with public cloud accounting for about 40% of this.
Taxonomy Notes (and Changes If Required)
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, are open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users, and are designed for a market and not a single enterprise. The public cloud market includes a 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 that IDC calls value-added content providers (VACPs).
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); they can be onsite or offsite and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff. For private cloud managed by in-house staff, "vendors (cloud service providers)" are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups. In this model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the "service users."