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IDC’s ranking of cloud infrastructure providers is in: HP has hit the top of the charts, with Dell and Cisco making up the top three.
The findings, which arrive in the analyst house’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, cover storage, server and Ethernet switch and show HP’s revenue growing 37.4% between 1Q14 and 1Q15, and market share at 15.7% for total 1Q15 revenues of $985 million. Dell, in second, has first quarter revenues of $745m, a market share of 11.9% and year over year revenue growth of 34.2%. Cisco, in third place, has first quarter revenues of $582m, an overall market share of 9.3% but revenue growth year over year of 30.1%.
The two companies positioned in fifth place, NetApp and Lenovo, had contrasting fortunes. NetApp’s revenue went up year on year by 1.5% to capture a 4.4% market share in 2015, down from 5.4% in 2014, while Lenovo’s revenue growth between 2014 and 2015 skyrocketed at 770.3%, moving from 0.5% market share in Q114 to 3.6% in Q115 – not especially surprising given IBM sold the majority of its x86 server business to the company last year. It’s worth noting that IDC declares a statistical tie between two companies when there is less than one percent market share between them.
Cloud infrastructure spending rose to nearly 30% of overall IT infrastructure spending in Q115 according to IDC, moving from 26.4% this time last year. According to Kuba Stolarski, research manager in server virtualisation and workload research at IDC: “Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms.
“Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernise their IT for the 3rd platform [mobile, big data and social], begin to deploy next-gen software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms.”
The ranking of cloud infrastructure vendors is not too dissimilar from the various work Synergy Research has undertaken in the area. According to March 2015 figures, Cisco and HP top the charts, ahead of Microsoft, Dell, and IBM; Lenovo just missed out but its huge market share increase due to the IBM sale was also noted.
Richard Davies, the CEO of cloud server provider ElasticHosts, bemoaned the issue of server companies charging the full amount despite half of server capacity in the cloud being underutilised. “A revolution in public cloud is coming,” he said. “Customers need to put the pressure on their providers to implement usage-based billing and stop paying for capacity they’re not using.”
Elsewhere, despite cloud and colocation resources resulting in the closure of many smaller local data centres, the number of premium, centralised data centres for larger migration projects is increasing.
That’s according to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) data centre quarterly survey on data centre trends. The research also found both medium and large organisations expect to increase spending on data centres, with the biggest growth expected to come from the healthcare and financial industries.