As IDC Sees It, Tech's 'Third Platform' Disrupts Everyone

It seems likely that IDC's assertion of an imbalance between public and private spend has occurred due to rapid public growth - that public cloud adoption is growing so rapidly that it's outstripping what's being spent on internal private environments. If that's the case, the imbalance will be even larger in 2015 and later years. In other words, the skew toward public cloud investment by IT will become even more pronounced in the future, making public cloud environments the de facto winner in the private vs. public debate.

Elsewhere in the report, IDC describes the dramatic change public cloud computing is having on the server market: "In 2014, an astounding 25-30 percent of server shipments (including shipments from ODMs) will go to cloud service providers' datacenters. This will grow to 43 percent by 2017."

IDC adds that this change will affect server companies, with new server designs increasingly focused on CSP requirements.

In part, this illustrates the shift described above: IT organizations bias spending toward the third Platform and away from legacy systems and even designs.

As Private Cloud Drifts Away, Several Public CSPs Will Rule