A new study from IHS has found the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market to be worth just more than US$4bn in 2013.

The study shows California, Texas, Virginia, UK, Netherlands and Singapore were emerging as the most active regional users of the technology.

The growth of IaaS will fundamentally change the way hardware vendors supply data center products, the report warned.

The report, Suppliers of Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service & Their Data Centers Report – 2014, estimates the total IaaS market size by calculating the revenues earned by its top 12 practitioners.

It also examines each of the top suppliers’ data center infrastructure for IaaS, with emphasis on the location and quantity of facilities for each company.

The IHS study found that Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM account for over half of IaaS revenue in 2013 but Google - which only introduced its offering in December - will be a Top 5 Supplier in 2014.

These four - along with AT&T, British Telecom, CenturyLink, Hewlett-Packard, Internap, Rackspace, Verizon Terremark and VMware – were identified by IHS as the top 12 global revenue generators in IaaS.

Between them they have over 100 IaaS-enabled data centers around the globe.

IHS’s senior analyst for data centers and critical infrastructure and report author Liz Cruz said the on-demand use of servers, networks, storage and operating systems – dubbed IaaS - is one of the three pillars on which cloud computing is built.

However, it is still the minority revenue generator in comparison with the other two – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (Saas).

“Despite its comparatively small size, IaaS is a quickly growing market with major implications for the data center infrastructure market as a whole,” Cruz said.

“As more companies move to an IaaS model, there will be a shrinking need for company-owned, enterprise data centers which means a very different customer base for the suppliers of data center equipment like UPS, cooling, racks and PDUs”.