Cisco Maintains Lead in Public Cloud Infrastructure while HP Leads in Private

RENO, NV, March 12, 2015

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco and HP maintained their leadership of the cloud infrastructure equipment market and in aggregate accounted for 27% of worldwide revenues. Across the different types of cloud deployment, Cisco has a clear lead in public cloud infrastructure while HP leads in private cloud. Both vendors saw their share of the total cloud market drop a little from the previous quarter as their sequential revenue growth did not quite match overall market growth. The bigger changes in market position came a bit further down the ranking, as IBM’s sale of its x86 server product line to Lenovo saw it drop to fifth place, behind Microsoft and Dell. Lenovo is now the seventh ranked vendor. Total Q4 cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including both hardware and software, were well over $13 billion, having grown by 9% year on year. Cisco’s overall leadership is due mainly to its dominance of the networking segment and its rapidly growing position in servers. HP is the market leader in cloud servers, a main challenger in storage and also part of the pack chasing Cisco in networking. Microsoft has total dominance of the server OS segment and is one of the leaders in virtualization applications. IBM remains a major player in both servers and storage. Servers, OS, storage and networking combined account for 92% of the cloud infrastructure market, with the balance comprising cloud security, cloud management and virtualization applications.

“Cloud infrastructure is a fast-growing market and now accounts for almost half of all data center infrastructure shipments,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “We are seeing strong growth across private, public and hybrid cloud deployments and across all geographic regions. While it remains relatively small, by far the highest growth is being seen in hybrid cloud and I expect this to continue over the next five years.”