The enterprise IT infrastructure market: Microsoft leads cloud collaboration, Cisco leads overall

New figures from Synergy Research around the state of the enterprise IT infrastructure market show that hosted and cloud collaboration revenues continue to grow quickly – with Microsoft at the top of the tree.

The overall market however – including data centre servers, switchers and routers, on-premise collaboration, network security and WLAN – has Cisco at its front with HPE behind. Aside from data centre servers and cloud collaboration, where it is second behind Microsoft, Cisco leads in the other segments and has a 26% overall market share, according to Synergy. HPE has 11% market share across the six segments.

Not surprisingly, hosted and cloud collaboration remains the fastest growing segment of enterprise IT infrastructure, with a growth rate of more than 12% year on year. WLAN, switchers and routers and network security also grew above the average rate, with the data centre server market flatlining and on-premise collaboration going backwards.

Other cited vendors include Dell EMC, with second position in data centres servers, Huawei for switches and routers, and Check Point for network security.

“Despite a burgeoning public cloud market, enterprise IT infrastructure spending was still on the rise in 2017 and will be for the next five years,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder and chief analyst in a statement. “The focus of that spending is changing, however, with a growing emphasis on hosted solutions, subscription-based business models and emerging technologies.

“Those changes will continue to present challenges for incumbent vendors and opportunities for new market entrants.”

Figures issued by Synergy earlier this week focused on the data centre market, with M&A deals for 2017 outpacing 2015 and 2016 combined.