HPE Leads Cloud Infrastructure Market

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

HP Enterprise closed out the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2015 by ranking first in the cloud infrastructure market, according to new data released today from cloud analyst firm, Synergy Research Group.

The market is growing at a rate of more than 20 percent as businesses snatch up servers, data storage systems, networking equipment, operating systems and virtualization software to float their clouds. Incidentally, those product categories accounted for 95 percent of all cloud infrastructure spending in Q4 2015. The remaining five percent went toward cloud security and management.

Cloud Storage and Backup Benefits

Protecting your company’s data is critical. Cloud storage with automated backup is scalable, flexible and provides peace of mind. Cobalt Iron’s enterprise-grade backup and recovery solution is known for its hands-free automation and reliability, at a lower cost. Cloud backup that just works.

SCHEDULE FREE CONSULT/DEMO

Taken altogether, cloud infrastructure revenues totaled over $60 billion last year.

Two vendors, HPE and Cisco, have been battling it out for the top spot past eight quarters, each with a market share that hovers around 12 percent. “In the two main application areas, Cisco maintains a strong lead in public cloud infrastructure while HPE has a strong lead in private cloud,” John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group chief analyst, told Datamation.

“HPE’s huge server business means that it has a mass of installed base and customers that can be transitioned to cloud, while Cisco’s domination of networking is virtually unchallenged and it also has a relatively small but rapidly growing server product line,” continued Dinsdale.

cloud infrastructure

Meanwhile, the industry is holding its breath to see if a certain mega-merger is finalized.

“Of course, if the Dell-EMC merger goes ahead then there will be a third player with a similar scale in cloud infrastructure,” Dinsdale said. Last October, privately-owned Dell bid $67 billion for data storage giant EMC, setting the stage for the largest tech deal in history.

Unsurprisingly, public cloud providers are gobbling up cloud hardware and software as demand for their services grows among enterprise customers.

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” observed Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, in a statement. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments.”

Essentially, CIOs have their heads in the cloud, and their data centers are following suit. “Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.