IBM Share of Cloud Infrastructure Equipment Hits Two-Year High

RENO, NV, April 1, 2013

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that IBM’s share of the cloud infrastructure equipment market hit a two-year high in Q4, reaching just over 19% thanks to a year-end jump in sales. HP has seen its fortunes in the market gradually declining, but it too saw a year-end jump in sales and pushed its market share back to nearly 16%. Conversely, Cisco has been steadily increasing market share but lost some momentum in the final quarter.

Full-year 2012 cloud infrastructure revenues passed the $40 billion mark, 4% up on 2011, with Q4 revenues coming in at just over $11 billion. The three main segments of the market are servers (51% of Q4 revenues), storage (21%) and networking infrastructure (23%). In Q4 IBM’s share of the server segment climbed to over 30%, while it also maintained second-placed ranking in the storage segment behind EMC despite seeing its storage revenues decrease 9% from Q3.  

“Cloud usage is now booming and this is driving continued high levels of investment in cloud infrastructure” says Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “No less than 45% of data center infrastructure shipments are now associated with the cloud, with just over half of that supporting public cloud services. The economic advantages of moving to the cloud are quite clear, and increased adoption is helping to gradually diminish concerns about security.