Nearly one-third of combined worldwide server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch infrastructure spending in the third quarter of 2014 came from cloud deployments, with payouts split nearly evenly between public and private clouds, according to a recent report from International Data Corp. (IDC). The research firm’s new Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker also shows that cloud providers and IT organizations alike are embracing software-defined infrastructure based on low-cost commodity hardware, presenting a challenge to established enterprise vendors.

While public cloud providers took in just under half of the $6.5 billion spent on cloud infrastructure in the third quarter, that sector is growing faster than its private cloud counterpart. Private clouds have been a preferred route for risk-averse CIOs, who seek to streamline operations while still keeping data behind the firewall.

Even organizations embarking on large-scale private cloud projects are taking a cue from public cloud providers and shifting away from the proprietary hardware that has traditionally dominated the corporate data center to the same kind of commodity-based architectures that the major cloud providers are using. That’s forcing incumbent vendors across every part of the stack to adjust their strategies, a transition that was most recently dramatized by Juniper Networks Inc.’s debut of its first open switch.

Other segments are also feeling the impact of the trend, with storage kingpin EMC Corp. refocusing its road map on a homegrown infrastructure-agnostic management platform while server vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell, Inc. ride the converged infrastructure bandwagon. The vendor landscape will probably look much different than it does now when the cloud era matures.

But the incumbents still have a few years left to migrate their existing revenue streams, IDC says. Combined spending on private and public cloud infrastructure in the third quarter amounted to about one-third of total worldwide revenue from servers, disk storage, and Ethernet switches. That represents a 16 percent increase over the same period last year, but it indicates customers are still buying a lot of equipment.

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