HPE, Cisco and Microsoft Lead Cloud Infrastructure Market

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When it comes to building clouds, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Cisco and Microsoft reign in the market, according to Q1 2016 data from Synergy Research Group.

“Cisco and HPE continue to battle it out for overall leadership. In the two main hardware application areas, Cisco maintains a strong lead in public cloud hardware while HPE has a strong lead in private cloud hardware,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research, in an email sent to Datamation. “Meanwhile Microsoft and VMware are in a league of their own for cloud software.”

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If the Dell-EMC deal proceeds as planned, the industry can expect another major player of similar scale to the IT giants that dominate the cloud infrastructure market today, added Dinsdale. In October 2015, Dell announced it was acquiring data storage leader EMC for $67 billion, a transaction that ranks as the largest technology deal in history.

cloud computing

On average, spending on data center infrastructure has hovered around the $29 billion mark for the last eight quarters. It’s a category that includes practically all of cloud computing’s building blocks, namely servers and server operating systems, storage, networking, network security and virtualization.

Cloud-enabled systems and deployments have conquered more than 50 percent of the overall data center infrastructure market, said the analyst group. The cloud infrastructure market has been growing at a rate of over 20 percent per year.

And there’s still room to grow, regardless of which side of the public vs. private cloud debate CIOs subscribe to.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50 percent per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30 percent, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, chief analyst and founder of Synergy Research. “But on the enterprise data center side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology.”

Earlier this year, the research firm observed that the cloud computing market had surpassed $110 billion in annual revenues and was growing at a rate of 28 percent per year. The public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) segments, led by Amazon and Microsoft, rocketed ahead with a blistering growth rate of 51 percent as of third quarter of 2015.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.