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The company may only be a week old – but Dell Technologies is already challenging the traditional leaders in the cloud infrastructure space, according to new data released from Synergy Research.

Naturally, this statement isn’t quite telling the whole truth. Even though Dell Technologies came into being on September 7, the company’s history, having come about following the completion of Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC, and all it entails – Virtustream, Pivotal, VCE et al – means it is more a question of semantics than anything else.

The Synergy verdict for Q216 revenues shows Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) as the overall leader by a nose, with 15% of the overall market including public cloud hardware, private cloud hardware, and software, while Cisco (14%) and Dell/EMC (13%) took the silver and bronze medals respectively.

The overall numbers show the continuation of a well-known trend.

The cloud software market is growing more quickly than the others, yet remain smaller. Microsoft has the lion’s share of the market, with VMware – another Dell Technologies subsidiary – in second place. Synergy notes the other primary players in this space are Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, and Oracle.

“While total spending on data centre infrastructure remains relatively flat, cloud share of that spending continues to rise as an ever-increasing portion of computer workloads migrate to either public or private clouds,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research founder and chief analyst, adding: “We are also seeing that within the cloud infrastructure market, hyperscale cloud operators are accounting for an ever-larger share of overall capex. This is a trend which is not going to change any time soon.”

The verdict of HPE leading the way was also echoed in the most recent analysis from IDC, in figures released in April of this year.