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Global cloud IT infrastructure, incorporating public and private, hit $7.6 billion (£5.32bn) in the third quarter of 2015, according to a research note from IDC.

HP, with a 15.7% market share in 3Q15 and revenue of $1.18bn, remains the top dog in cloud infrastructure according to the researchers, gaining in share from the previous year (15.0%). Dell and Cisco are in joint second place – the result of two vendors being less than one statistical point apart –  with revenues of $783m and $731 and market share of 10.4% and 9.7%.

It was a similar story in the battle for fifth place, with NetApp, IBM, and Lenovo all too close to be separated, and EMC on its own in fourth. The big winner over the past year was Lenovo, with an almost 750% revenue gain, while IBM was the major faller, dropping 42% in revenue year over year. All the other vendors, aside from NetApp, posted positive yearly change.

Cloud as the basis for overall IT infrastructure continues to rise, with more than a third (33.8%) of cloud infrastructure sales in 3Q15 compared to 28.7% a year ago. Revenue in traditional, non-cloud infrastructure declined by 3.2% year on year, as well as in each segment – server, storage, and Ethernet switch. On a regional basis, Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – was the fastest growing market at 35.3% year over year, well ahead of Western Europe (22.1%). In terms of individual countries, Japan (47.1%) was the fastest grower ahead of Canada (22.0%) and the US (20.1%).

“IDC continues to see healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments in the market with an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing hardware and platforms. “Customers are modernising their infrastructures, having a progressively larger number of viable options for cloud deployments either on or off premises.

“As public cloud offerings continue to evolve and improve in reliability and security, customers are becoming more comfortable with the flexibility that they get by deploying certain workloads in these elastic environments,” Stolarski added.