Global spending on cloud infrastructure hit $7.7 billion in the last quarter, despite the information technology industry going through what International Data Corp. described as a “lull” in the construction of large hyperscale data centers.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker for the second quarter revealed that sales of servers, switches and storage gear for use in private and public clouds rose by 14.5 percent from a year ago. But IDC called the second quarter a slow one, because it didn’t include numbers for hyperscale data centers. As such, we can expect to see even bigger numbers once the world’s biggest data center operators get back into the groove – something that’s likely to happen soon with the likes of Google and Microsoft all recently announcing plans to do just that.

Breaking the numbers down a bit, IDC said that sales of infrastructure to public clouds increased by 14.9 percent to $4.6 billion, which certainly isn’t unhealthy. Private cloud sales meanwhile, hauled in $3.1 billion in sales, an increase of 14 percent. Those figures contrast starkly with what IDC termed “traditional” servers and other gear destined for non-cloud use, which saw sales fall by 6.1 percent year on year.

The list of top vendors was full of familiar faces once again, with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) sitting pretty at the top. Dell Technologies Inc. is hot on its heels however, and will surely overtake its rival once fourth-placed EMC Corp.’s sales are added to its own. Cisco Systems Inc. came in at third, while Lenovo Group Ltd., NetApp Inc., IBM, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., and Inspur Technologies Co. Ltd., a Chinese white-box vendor, were tied for fifth place.

“Cloud is one of the major options considered by end users as they think about optimization of their IT operations and utilization of on-site and off-site resources,” Natalya Yezhkova, research director for storage systems at IDC, said in a statement. “This demand for cloud services will continue to drive the underlying shift in IT infrastructure spending from on-premises to off-premises deployments. As public cloud datacenters represent the major segment of off-premises IT infrastructure deployments, overall spending done by this segment is closely tied to spending by public cloud service providers, in particular, hyperscale SPs.”

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