Demand for IT hardware set to spike says Morgan Stanley

On-premises hardware vendors are about to see a boost in revenues – in North America at least – according to a new Morgan Stanley research note. Companies have held back from investing in hardware while working out “how, when and how much of their workloads to move to the cloud”, suggests Katy L. Huberty, head of North American Technology Hardware Equity research at the financial services company – but now those decisions have been made companies will be making overdue investments in hardware.

Huberty also believes the weak dollar and the falling price of memory will help boost demand, as will enthusiasm for AI technologies and the Internet of Things, each of which will increase demand for data centre hardware. Huberty’s conclusion is that now is a good time to buy stock in hardware vendors. It should also be noted that ever-increasing investment in cloud deployments requires hardware too – the cloud doesn’t actually float in the air.

On the other hand, any company investing in vast new amounts of hardware will need the spare cash to upgrade existing hardware and will need to spend a lot of money on contractors and/or permanent staff to build and run these new datacentres. It is surely the case that many organisations making significant additions to their IT estates will continue to base them in large part on efficient, secure and swiftly scalable off-premises cloud services.

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