Data centre IT infrastructure investment in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) is expected to grow from $29bn in 2010 to $40bn by 2015, according to Canalys.
The IT research company said that private and public cloud development is expected to fuel data centre transformation and consolidation, driving the market’s 6% compound annual growth rate.
While servers are projected to remain the largest market component, Canalys forecasts virtualisation and storage will grow more quickly.
On a worldwide basis, Canalys anticipates data centre IT infrastructure end-user revenue to grow by an average of 7% each year, to reach $149bn by 2015, up from $107bn last year.
EMEA is expected to account for 27% of the global value, with other regions – notably Asia Pacific – poised to expand at faster rates.
Canalys director of Enterprise Services Matthew Ball said data centre transformation has emerged as a key IT topic in recent years, with a focus on establishing more centralised, pooled computing, storage and network resources to facilitate cloud computing.
"Data centres will need to improve service levels to customers, whether internal or to third parties, by accommodating growing data and network bandwidth demands and merging complex architectures that were once technology silos – all while achieving a low carbon footprint and occupying minimal floor space."
Canalys said that the shift to public and private cloud computing will stimulate consolidation of multiple server closets, server rooms and small data centres to privately owned or third-party-operated large data centres.
"As companies place an increasing proportion of their IT assets in fewer locations, risk also increases,’ said Ball.
"Cloud computing service providers will continue to build out their data centre footprints and offer infrastructure as a service to customers that outsource their equipment requirements or adopt cloud-bursting models."
Canalys Analyst Alex Smith said, "Services, including professional and managed services, will be essential for data centre transformation and the adoption of private and public cloud computing."
"As IT budgets become less constrained, especially in the public sector in the medium term, data centre transformation will grow, creating demand for core IT infrastructure components. The challenge, however, is getting the right scale of compute, storage and network resources to meet current and future demand without too much or too little capacity."
