HPE Maintains Lead in Cloud Infrastructure but Cisco Narrows the Gap

RENO, NV, March 21, 2016

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that HPE maintained its leadership of the burgeoning cloud infrastructure equipment market, though Cisco narrowed the gap in the quarter. In a market that is growing at well over 20% per year, both vendors saw strong growth in their cloud infrastructure revenues. The two vendors have been in a closely contested leadership battle for the last eight quarters. Dell and Microsoft were virtually tied for third place in the market. All four leading vendors saw sequential market share declines as IBM benefitted from its typically strong year-end and ODMs (contract manufacturers) continued to take away business from more traditional vendors. Across the different types of cloud deployment, Cisco continues to hold a commanding lead in public cloud infrastructure while HP has a clear lead in private cloud. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including hardware and software, reached well over $60 billion in 2015. HPE has a clear lead in the cloud server segment and is a main challenger in storage, while Cisco is dominant in the networking segment and also has a rapidly growing server product line. Microsoft features heavily in the ranking due to its position in server OS and virtualization applications, while Dell and IBM maintain a strong position across a range of cloud technology markets. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95% of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market, with the balance comprising cloud security and cloud management. 

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”