Enterprises are curbing their spends in the fourth quarter of 2019, and spending on information technology infrastructure is set to remain flat from last year, as per a recent forecast by Enterprise Technology Research. However, it is not all gloomy; some disruptive technologies and key markets in cloud technologies are expected to show strong growth in the fourth quarter.
Enterprises are exercising caution when it comes to investments, with uncertainty looming large in terms of the anticipated changing leadership in governments. The constant shift from the legacy solutions is making businesses adopt third-party solutions that offer flexibility and sustainability. This, in turn, is making companies prioritize their IT spending. Businesses are narrowing their scope of investment while evaluating benefits and costs and looking for better alternatives at the same time.
Storage technology is one such area that has been hugely hit, and spending on new hardware is declining rapidly due to the growing popularity of cloud storage services offered by AWS and Microsoft. Many IT industry leaders have already invested a chunk of their revenue in flash storage; hence they do not see the need to invest further. A large part of investment has shifted toward upcoming disruptive technologies such as AI, automation, machine learning, container platforms, and orchestration.
The major cloud providers are set to benefit from these emerging investment trends. Microsoft is making the best of this environment and has been witnessing unprecedented growth over the past few years. AWS, the leading company in the cloud market, with almost 67% of Fortune 500 companies using Amazon’s services.
AWS is set to be around two and a half times larger than its closest rival, Azure, in the IaaS market. AWS has an annual growth rate of $35 billion a year compared to Azure’s $10–12 billion.
Though both cloud and storage markets are seeing the opposite ends of growth, an increase in edge computing and IoT can soon bring hardware storage back on the growth track. This growth, however, would depend largely on the adoption of the technologies above.
