Technology

Posted on April 7, 2017 by staff

Gartner sees huge shift to hybrid infrastructure services

Technology

Gartner predicts that by 2020 90 per cent of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

The growth of cloud and industrialised services alongside the decline of traditional data centre outsourcing (DCO) indicate a massive shift toward hybrid infrastructure services, according to the IT research and advisory firm.

In a report containing a series of predictions about IT infrastructure services, analysts from the IT research and advisory firm said that by 2020 spending on cloud, hosting and traditional infrastructure services will be more or less the same.

“As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organizations will shift toward more industrialized, less-tailored options,” said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner.

“Organisations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimise costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment.”

A 2016 Gartner survey of 303 DCO reference customers worldwide found that 20 per cent use hybrid infrastructure services and 20 per cent more intend to get them in the next 12 months.

The traditional DCO market is shrinking, according to Gartner’s forecast data. Worldwide traditional DCO spending is expected to decline from $55.1 billion in 2016 to $45.2 billion in 2020.

In comparison cloud compute services are expected to grow from $23.3 billion in 2016 to reach $68.4 billion in 2020. Spending on colocation and hosting is also expected to increase, from $53.9 billion in 2016 to $74.5 billion in 2020.

In addition, infrastructure utility services (IUS) will grow from $21.3 billion in 2016 to $37 billion in 2020 and storage as a service will increase from $1.7 billion in 2016 to 2.7 billion in 2020.

In 2016, traditional worldwide DCO and IUS together represented 49 per cent of the $154 billion total data centre services market worldwide, consisting of DCO/IUS, hosting and cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

This is expected to tilt further toward cloud IaaS and hosting and by 2020, DCO/IUS will be approximately 35 per cent of the expected $228 billion worldwide data centre services market.

“This means that by 2020 traditional services will coexist with a minority share alongside the industrialised and digitalised services,” said Mishra.

Gartner also predicts that through 2020, data centre and relevant “as a service” (aaS) pricing will continue to decline by at least 10 per cent per year.

From 2008 through 2016, Gartner pricing analysis of data centre service offerings shows prices have dropped yearly by 5 per cent to 7 per cent for large deals and by 9 per cent to 12 per cent for smaller deals.

More recently — from 2012 to the present — prices for the new aaS offerings, including IaaS and storage as a service, have dropped in similar to higher ranges.

Traditional DCO vendors will exit the DCO market due to price pressure says Gartner, while others will develop solution capabilities and continue to compete.

Buyers will have the ability to choose between many more vendors, choose traditional or new solutions and achieve price reductions year over year through 2020.