Enterprise IT Infrastructure Spending Increased in 2017; Cisco Maintains a Big Lead

RENO, NV, January 3, 2018

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across six key enterprise infrastructure segments, vendor revenues for the last four quarters increased by nearly 3% on an annualized basis. Aggregate revenues for the last four quarters reached $113 billion, with revenue in each of the last twelve quarters typically in the $26-29 billion range. Data center servers comprise the largest segment of the market, though revenues here declined by almost 1% in 2017. Switches & routers are the second-largest segment and they experienced growth of 4%. Hosted & cloud collaboration grew the most while on-premise collaboration continued to be challenged by aggressive price competition and market disruption. Cisco remains the dominant enterprise vendor. It is the market leader in four of the six segments with the exceptions being hosted and cloud collaboration, where it is ranked second, and data center servers, where it is ranked fifth. In aggregate across the six segments, Cisco’s market share over the last four quarters was 26%, down a percentage point from the preceding four quarters. HPE is the second ranked enterprise vendor with a market share of 11% across the six segments. It is the leader in data center servers, the number two ranked vendor in WLAN and ranked third in switches & routers. Hosted and cloud collaboration is the one area where neither Cisco nor HPE are the top vendor; Microsoft is the leader in this segment. The number two ranked vendors in the other segments are Dell EMC (enterprise data center servers), Huawei (switches and routers), Microsoft (on-premise collaboration) and Check Point (network security). Major vendors who have achieved particularly high 2017 growth rates in these highly competitive markets include Super Micro, Arista Networks and RingCentral.

“Despite a burgeoning public cloud market, enterprise IT infrastructure spending was still on the rise in 2017 and will be for the next five years,” said Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst Jeremy Duke. “The focus of that spending is changing, however, with a growing emphasis on hosted solutions, subscription-based business models and emerging technologies. Those changes will continue to present challenges for incumbent vendors and opportunities for new market entrants.”