Dell Technologies Challenging HPE, Cisco and Microsoft for Cloud Infrastructure Leadership

RENO, NV, September 13, 2016

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that in the burgeoning market for technology to build clouds, the newly formed Dell Technologies is now chasing HPE, Cisco and Microsoft for leadership in the three main segments – private cloud hardware, public cloud hardware and cloud infrastructure software respectively. While the Dell EMC merger didn’t officially close until September, Dell and EMC in aggregate would have been ranked second in private cloud hardware and third in public cloud hardware based on worldwide Q2 revenues. Across all cloud hardware, HPE had the lead with 15%, closely followed by Cisco on 14% and Dell EMC 13%. Meanwhile Dell Technologies’ majority owned VMware subsidiary was ranked second in cloud infrastructure software. Other major cloud infrastructure vendors included IBM, Lenovo, Huawei, Oracle and NetApp. The growth rate for the total cloud infrastructure market dropped off a little in the quarter but on a rolling annualized basis it still grew by over 16%. For the last nine quarters total spend on data center infrastructure – which includes servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software – has been running at an average $29 billion, with the market being increasingly driven by the cloud. Cloud deployments or shipments of systems that are cloud enabled now account for well over half of the total data center infrastructure market.

“While total spending on data center infrastructure remains relatively flat, cloud share of that spending continues to rise as an ever-increasing portion of computer workloads migrate to either public or private clouds,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “We are also seeing that within the cloud infrastructure market, hyperscale cloud operators are accounting for an ever-larger share of overall capex. This is a trend which is not going to change any time soon.”