Total revenue for the period was US$14.5 billion, the company said, adding that it had lowered its forecasts for cloud IT infrastructure for the year to US$66.9 billion, a drop of 4.5% from the forecast made in the previous quarter.

Year-over-year growth would also slow to 1.6%, IDC said.

Vendor revenue from sales of hardware infrastructure to public cloud environments for the quarter was down 13.4% compared to the previous quarter, but up 8.9% year-on-year to US$9.8 billion.

"Although it will continue to account for the majority of spending on cloud IT environments, its share will decrease from 69.1% in 2018 to 66.5% in 2019," it said.

"In contrast, spending on private cloud IT infrastructure has showed more stable growth since IDC started tracking sales of IT infrastructure products in various deployment environments. In the first quarter of 2019, vendor revenues from private cloud environments increased 16.9% year-over-year reaching US$4.7 billion."

It said spending in this segment was expected to grow 10.1% year-over-year in 2019.

"As the overall IT infrastructure goes through a period of slowdown after an outstanding 2018, the important trends might look somewhat distorted in the short term," said Natalya Yezhkova, research vice-president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies at IDC.

"IDC's long-term expectations strongly back continuous growth of cloud IT infrastructure environments. With vendors and service providers finding new ways of delivering cloud services, including from IT infrastructure deployed at customer premises, end users have fewer obstacles and pain points in adopting cloud/services-based IT."