The COVID-19 pandemic will impact spending on IT infrastructure.
According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker and Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, under the current probable scenario server market revenues will decline 3.4% year over year to $88.6 billion and external enterprise storage systems (ESS) revenues will decline 5.5% to $28.7 billion in 2020.
The server market is expected to decline 11.0% in Q1 and 8.9% in Q2 and then return to growth in the second half of the year. The external ESS market is forecast to decline 7.3% in Q1 and 12.4% in Q2 before returning to slight growth by the end of 2020 with further recovery expected in 2021.
"The impact of COVID-19 will certainly dampen overall spending on IT infrastructure as companies temporarily shut down and employees are laid off or furloughed," said Kuba Stolarski, research director, IT Infrastructure at IDC. "While IDC believes that the short-term impact will be significant, unless the crisis spirals further out of control, it is likely that this will not impact the markets past 2021, at which point we will see a robust recovery with cloud platforms very much leading the way."
In the longer term both markets will return to growth. The server market is expected to deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.9% over the 2019-2024 forecast period with revenues reaching $116.6 billion in 2024. Meanwhile the external ESS market will see a five-year CAGR of 1.3% growing to $32.4 billion in 2024.
"The IT infrastructure markets are already going though a transformation and shifts in end user spending will bring an even faster changing IT buyer landscape," said Natalya Yezhkova, research vice president, IT Infrastructure. "While the current crisis brings tensions and uncertainty to the market, it also will push organizations to expedite adoption of technologies and IT delivery models that help with optimization of IT infrastructure resources."
