Cloud equipment market to exceed $33 billion in 2011

The cloud equipment market is set to exceed $33 billion (21.1 billion) this year alone, according to the latest quarterly report from Synergy Research.

The forecast, comes as part of its Cloud Market Share Report, which includes the networking, computing, and storage platforms deployed for private cloud, virtual private network (VPN) based public cloud, and non-VPN public cloud.

The report found the cloud equipment market for the first half of 2011 exceeded $17 billion (10.9 billion) in sales.

Although public cloud platforms represented the biggest share of cloud equipment spending, representing 56 per cent in the first half of 2011, the private cloud platform segment is the fastest growing at over 30 per cent a year.

Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst, said: "From small start ups being able to access massive scale computing facilities to new cloud-based consumer services, cloud will continue to open up a wealth of opportunities for innovation."

The analyst firm defines a private cloud platform as a virtualised data centre, which resides behind an organisation's firewall.

Despite accelerated private cloud adoption, the report also said public cloud deployments could grow exponentially in coming years as infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) become more widely used by both consumers and businesses.

From a regional perspective, the US leads in cloud equipment sales, with 39.7 per cent of the market in the first half of 2011 according to the report.

But the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region was the fastest growing at a rate of 30.3 per cent a year, with the UK leading the charge.

"The countries that follow [US] cloud equipment sales in ranked order include Japan, Germany, the UK and China," added Duke.

Across the different cloud equipment market segments, the report found that the leading vendors varied. For example, Cisco continued to be the dominant networking infrastructure supplier for cloud deployments with a nearly 50 per cent market share.

In virtualised computing systems segment, HP and IBM represented over 50 per cent of the market share combined. And Dell, NetApp and HP accounted for half of the storage segment.

By sales, the top five cloud equipment vendors in the first of half of 2011 were HP with 19.9 per cent; IBM with 17.9 per cent; Dell with 14.7 per cent; Cisco with 10.4 per cent, and Oracle with a 5.2 per cent share.