Cisco Maintains Lead in Cloud Infrastructure Market

RENO, NV, September 23, 2013

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco maintained leadership of the cloud infrastructure equipment market, after taking over pole position for the first time in the previous quarter. Long-time leader IBM saw its share of the market bounce back a little from the historic low it saw in Q1, but not by enough to close the gap with Cisco. HP’s share slid a little to just over 14%. Total quarterly revenues from cloud infrastructure once again passed the $10 billion milestone, after a decline in the previous quarter. Total revenues for the quarter were $10.1 billion, 6% up sequentially and marginally up on the second quarter of 2012. On a rolling four quarterly basis, annual growth has dropped off a little to 2%. Computing system’s share of total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues nudged up to 47% in the quarter, while networking accounted for a quarter of total revenues and storage 22%. The balance of the market consists of cloud management and SaaS application licenses.

“After steadily and consistently building its share in this market Cisco has done well to hold onto its newly-won lead” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “We are forecasting that there will be continued steady market growth for data center generally and for cloud infrastructure specifically, but we are also predicting that the mix of spend will trend slowly away from computing systems and towards storage and networking. That presents IBM and HP with an extra challenge in combating Cisco’s leadership.”