This IDC study provides forecasts for some of the most critical drivers of IT hardware industry development and market expansion: IT infrastructure hardware solutions for public and private clouds. It provides insights into the forces that drive combined spending on server, storage, and datacenter network hardware by public cloud service providers of all types. It also shows how demands for solutions to support a growing range of distinct "cloud workloads" will shape datacenter architecture and deployment decisions in public and private cloud environments.

The buildout of public cloud service environments remains a critical opportunity for suppliers of server, storage, and network systems, but these customers' demands are shifting toward greater use of highly simplified and standardized hardware systems along with open source software. Total spending on these hardware systems by public cloud service providers will increase to $11.3 billion in 2016.

The IT infrastructure hardware industry is also in a position to be among the major beneficiaries of the deployment of private cloud environments, primarily through sales of converged systems. Although spending in support of compute (virtual) workloads currently accounts for a majority of the IT infrastructure hardware spend, this situation will change in the coming years as more organizations also deploy storage-heavy private cloud content and archive environments.

"For the past two years, organizations' growing desire to deploy their own private clouds for application, compute, and content emerged as another major driver of new IT infrastructure hardware consumption." — Richard Villars, vice president, Datacenter and Cloud