April 5, 2023
IDC has just released its quarterly cloud server and storage spending assessments for 2022, as well as its forecasts for spending from 2023 to 2027.
The most important bits of data have to do with spending for 2023. Overall worldwide spending is expected to decline by nine-tenths of a point to $153.5 billion, with all of that decline due to a forecasted 10.9% drop in spending for on-premises, non-cloud gear. Spending on cloud capacity, whether running in one of the big clouds or regional or niche service providers, is expected to grow by 6.9% to $93.7 billion.
Shared cloud capacity, or what many call public cloud, is expected to bring in $66.1 billion in 2023, up 7.5% from 2025’s spending levels. Meanwhile, dedicated cloud, which can mean outposts of the big clouds that run on co-location facilities or corporate datacenters, is expected to grow modestly, up 5.4%, this year to $27.6 billion in sales.
By the end of the forecast period, more than two-thirds of the revenues being spent on compute and storage capacity by end-user companies will be for shared or dedicated cloud infrastructure services, and less than one-third will be for legacy non-cloud infrastructure.
It should be noted that while the chart released by IDC shows a decline in non-cloud spending, it is not clear how IDC draws the line between cloud and non-cloud. For example, an IBM mainframe can have thousands of logical partitions and can have metered pricing for hardware and software. All things considered, cloud is growing, and it makes non-cloud spending look like it is in decline.
The sources for this piece include an article in NextPlatform.
