2021 Review – Microsoft and Amazon Dominate IT Vendor Revenue and Growth Ranking

RENO, NV, December 21, 2021

Synergy Research Group’s detailed review of 2021 IT markets identified 13 vendors that generated over $25 billion in annual revenues from sales of technology to enterprises and service providers. Microsoft was the leader by a wide margin with annual revenues of $120 billion from its enterprise customers, followed by IBM, Amazon, Huawei and Cisco. In terms of annual revenue growth, Amazon Web Services led the way with 36% growth, followed by Salesforce and Microsoft, who each grew their revenues by well over 20%. None of the other leaders managed to achieve double-digit growth rates, with Cisco coming the closest. At the other end of the spectrum Huawei saw its revenues from enterprise and service provider customers fall by 9%, as it was hurt by geopolitical issues and technology supply restrictions. While Huawei’s revenues dropped, business levels at both Ericson and Nokia were mostly flat, demonstrating the relative weakness of service provider sales compared with the enterprise sector. In aggregate the thirteen vendors generated 2021 revenues of $613 billion from enterprise and service provider customers, up 10% from 2021. The analysis is based on Synergy’s detailed quarterly tracking data for a comprehensive range of enterprise IT markets. The full-year 2021 revenue numbers represent actual data for the first three quarters of the year and a forecast of Q4 activity levels. The larger market segments include cloud infrastructure services, collaboration, enterprise software/SaaS, data center infrastructure, service provider infrastructure and enterprise IT services. Segments with the highest growth rates are cloud infrastructure services, SaaS, hosted & cloud collaboration and service provider data center infrastructure.

“The performance of the technology titans was a bit of a mixed bag in 2021, but the good news is that only Huawei saw its revenues decline and that was due to factors that were largely beyond its control. Across a broad swathe of enterprise technology markets, vendors saw double-digit revenue growth,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Cloud and software-oriented markets were the standout performers, driving stellar growth for AWS, Microsoft and Salesforce. Vendors whose sales are focused primarily on more traditional on-premise products or infrastructure will continue to have a hard time generating exciting levels of growth.”