Dell, HPE, Cisco Top Cloud Infrastructure Market – Analysts

The newly minted Dell EMC is making its presence felt in the global cloud infrastructure market. The company now ranks as one of the three top hardware suppliers along with stalwarts Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco, according to a new report.By the end of the fourth quarter of 2016, Dell, HPE and Cisco all had a 11.5% share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy Research Group, which released its report Monday.For a number of years, HPE and Cisco fought for the top spot in the cloud infrastructure market, but the newly formed Dell EMC company has wedged its way into a top spot thanks to its storage offerings. (See Cisco Gains, Dell & HPE Lose on Cloud Infrastructure - Analyst.)In addition to these companies, the report found that smaller ODM contract manufacturers, when taken in aggregate, control about 11% of this market as well, showing that many enterprises are willing to gamble on smaller suppliers if the price is right.Figure 1:(Source: Synergy Research Group)Overall, the cloud infrastructure market totaled $70 billion in 2016, with the fourth quarter accounting for about 27% of that overall number. The majority of that money was spent on public cloud platforms, which saw double-digit growth through the year. At the same time, spending on private cloud slowed. (See Private Cloud Is Very Popular Yet Nobody's Doing It.)"While spend on cloud services and infrastructure is already huge it is still relatively early days in the transition of enterprise workloads to the cloud. That means that success in the cloud infrastructure market is vitally important to IT vendors and they will be fighting long and hard to maximize their market shares," John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy, wrote in a statement.Over the latest 12 months, businesses of all sizes spent most of their money on physical servers, operating systems, storage, networking and virtualization software.Businesses also spent more in 2016 on cloud security and cloud management.While Dell has had success supplying storage, HPE dominated the server part of the market, while Cisco supplied the most networking equipment. While Cisco dominated in the public cloud market, Dell and HPE went head-to-head in the private cloud market.Microsoft, which supplies OS and virtualization software, and IBM, which also suppliers different cloud technologies, also ranked in the report.Related posts:Public Cloud Spending Will Hit $122B in 2017 – ReportHybrid Cloud Gains in Popularity, Survey FindsMid-Market Will Be Cloud's Next Wave— Scott Ferguson, Editor, Enterprise Cloud News. Follow him on Twitter @sferguson_LR.