The world’s data center infrastructure market is bracing itself for “dramatic changes” over the next two to four years, according to a new report from Gartner Inc.

Joe Skorupa, Gartner vice president and analyst, said that four factors – highly disruptive competition, big cloud provider dominance, economic warfare and nationalism – are set to have a profound impact on the marketplace.

“Elements of them are already in play, and will become visible no later than early 2016; however, radical action by just one significant player could accelerate the market disruption of any of the factors,” Skorupa said.

With tensions between East and West data center infrastructure suppliers only likely to increase, Skorupa forecasts constant fluctuation from both sides as they seek to dominate the market. However, it’s likely to be Chinese firms that ultimately benefit from the disruption, with Gartner forecasting a two percent increase in their market share by 2017, coming at the expense of western firms.

Anti-US sentiment will be the main factor at play. Gartner notes that China’s government has various subsidized programs in place to help its enterprises reduce their R&D costs. This is in addition to the likely occurrence of more “Snowden-like” security breaches, which will cause buyers to become distrustful of larger western providers like AMD, Intel, Seagate and Western Digital. Gartner reckons this will lead to an increase of “in-country developed technologies”, together with a resurgence of smaller, local assemblers that are perceived to be more transparent than large western multinationals.

“These small assemblers would be unable to fully replace the economies of scale that the traditional large suppliers have benefited from in areas such as R&D, but the increasing use of open-source hardware ecosystems will help mitigate the problem,” added Skorupa.

The good news at least is there should still be plenty of cash to go round both China and the west. Gartner says global spending on data center gear is set to reach $94.8 billion by the end of this year, and almost $98.4 billion in 2015.

Perhaps a bigger impact will come from Gartner’s prediction that high-performance rotating media will become less important in the next few years. It says the storage component market will steadily shift towards Flash technologies, which could well cause problems for traditional vendors. Instead, big cloud providers will slowly become the most dominant players.

“Traditional managed service providers (MSPs) and infrastructure providers are failing to deliver compelling alternatives to platform as a service (PaaS) from Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Baidu,” said Skorupa.

“MSPs are relegated to providing basic transport, or, at best, become managed service brokers. Amid this churn, traditional vendors find it increasingly hard to compete.”

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