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Over the last four quarters, spend on data centre infrastructure hit $114 billion – and Microsoft and Hewlett Packard are the vendors at the top of the tree.
That’s the verdict from industry analysts Synergy Research. Microsoft is particularly dominant in the software market, with 72% of share compared to VMware on 17%. Yet that comprises less than a quarter (23%) of the overall data centre infrastructure market.
On the hardware side, HP (19%) is the largest vendor, followed by Cisco (12%), Dell (12%) and IBM (11%). Synergy describes HP’s lead in data centre hardware as “strong”, and notes other leading players in the market are EMC, Lenovo, NetApp, Oracle, Fujitsu and Hitachi.
Picture credit: Synergy Research
It’s worth noting here that this examines the overall market, both traditional on-prem and cloud, the former which Synergy describes as “huge”. Synergy links servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualisation apps in its overall examination of the market.
Despite the behemoth-like size of the traditional data centre market, cloud is catching up, according to Synergy founder and chief analyst Jeremy Duke.
“Clearly the single biggest driver of spend on data centre infrastructure is the boom in cloud computing,” he said. “The shift in computing workloads to public and private clouds is driving huge investments in both service provider and enterprise data centres.” John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy, argued the industry focus on cloud took away from the size of the traditional data centre market. “That part of the data centre market remains enormous and will remain a prime source of revenue for vendors for many years to come,” he said.
Synergy’s other research has predominantly focused on the infrastructure and collaboration markets; the most recent report on the cloud infrastructure services market saw Amazon Web Services hit a five year high, while analysis of the cloud infrastructure equipment market saw Cisco and HP leading the way.
Earlier this week, a report from Zenium Technology Partners saw half of organisations polled do not operate a data centre that could continue to function after a natural disaster.