Revealing the statistics in its worldwide quarterly cloud IT infrastructure tracker, the analyst firm pointed out that overall, vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products, which are made up of servers, storage, and Ethernet switches for cloud, grew by 23 percent year over year to $7.6 billion (£5.3bn) in the quarter.

The all-in-all share of cloud IT infrastructure sales, as opposed to traditional non-cloud infrastructure sales, rose to 33.8 percent in the third quarter of last year, up from 28.7 percent the year before. Sales of non-cloud infrastructure dipped 3.2 percent year over year.

Preference for public

“IDC continues to see healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments in the market with an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure,” said Kuba Stolarski, research director for computing hardware and platforms at IDC.

“Customers are modernising their infrastructures, having a progressively larger number of viable options for cloud deployments either on or off premises.”

When it comes to specific vendors, HP led the pack in during the quarter with $1.18 billion of sales, up from $925 million (£645m) for the same period last year, and 15.7 percent of the sales market share. Dell and Cisco took joint second place, with EMC in third place with $548 million (£382m) worth of sales.

Interestingly, the region where cloud IT infrastructure sales grew the fasted was in Japan, where a 47.1 percent year over year growth was witnessed. The rest of Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, grew by 35.3 percent. These regions were followed by Western Europe at 22.1 percent and Canada at 22 percent. Cloud infrastructure sales in Central and Eastern Europe actually declined at a 10.2 percent rate year over year due to the ongoing political and economic crises, said IDC.