Turmoil In Eastern Europe Holds Region Back From Cloud Upturn

The shift to cloud computing is continuing with its relentless rampage across the business and consumer markets this year as a new report shows sales of cloud hardware have shot up 25 percent.

However, cloud IT infrastructure sales actually declined in Central and Eastern Europe, with research firm IDC attributing the downturn to the political and economic turmoil the region is currently experiencing.

But IDC’s quarterly worldwide cloud tracker report revealed all other regions saw growth in spending in the first quarter of 2015.

£4 billion sales

According to IDC, sales of servers, storage equipment and Ethernet switches for cloud, including both public and private cloud use cases, grew 25.1 percent year over year to nearly $6.3 billion (£4bn) in the first quarter of 2015. IDC said this was the second highest growth spurt it’s seen in five quarters.

What’s more, IDC’s quarterly report has revealed that cloud IT infrastructure spending creeped up to account for a whopping 30 percent of all IT infrastructure spending in the first quarter of 2015, up from 24.4 percent the same time last year.

“Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC researcher.

“Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernize their IT for the 3rd Platform, begin to deploy next-gen software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms.”

When it comes to specific vendors, HP came out on top, holding a 15.7 percent market share with first quarter revenues of $985 million. Dell and Cisco followed hot on HP’s heels with an 11.9 percent and 9.3 percent market share respectively.

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