Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% year over year to $2.1 trillion in 2014, according to IDC. For the hosting industry prospects are even better, as IT spending will be driven mainly by cloud services, big data & analytics, as well as mobile computing and social networking.
Cloud spending, including cloud hosting services and the technologies to enable these services, will surge by 25% in 2014, reaching over $100 billion next year. Spending on big data technologies and services will grow by 30% in 2014, surpassing $14 billion.
IDC expects to see a dramatic increase in the number of data centers as cloud players race to achieve global scale. This will be accompanied by a similar expansion in the variety of workload-specialized cloud infrastructure services, leading to new forms of differentiation among cloud hosting and services providers.
Cloud-dedicated data centers
Demand for big data analytics skills would continue to outstrip supply, according to IDC. Here the race will be on to develop ‘data-optimized cloud platforms’, capable of leveraging high volumes of data and/or real-time data streams. Value-added content providers and data brokers will proliferate as enterprises (and developers) look for interesting data sources as well as applications that help them to understand their customers, products, and the markets in which they exist.
Data centers represent the physical foundation underneath cloud hosting and services, and are thus a crucial component of IT spending in 2014. As cloud-dedicated data centers grow in number and importance, the market for server, storage, and networking components will increasingly be driven by cloud hosting and services providers, who have traditionally favored highly componentized and commoditized designs.
