2019 Spending on Data Center Hardware & Software Tops $150 Billion, Driven by Public Cloud

RENO, NV, March 25, 2020

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that worldwide spend on data center hardware and software reached $152 billion in 2019, up 2% from 2018. Within that, spending on public cloud data center hardware and software grew by 7%, while spending on traditional data center and private cloud fell by 1%. Public cloud data centers now account for 37% of the total, their share of spending having grown from 25% in 2015. Q4 spending on all data center hardware and software was up 7% from Q3, reflecting normal seasonal trends. The total data center infrastructure spending data covers both cloud and non-cloud, service provider and enterprise data center, hardware and software. By product the data covers servers, OS, storage, networking, virtualization software, network security and management software. Servers are the largest product category and accounted for 46% of hardware and software spending in 2019. Vendor market share ranking in Q4 showed the leaders being Dell, Microsoft, HPE and Cisco. They were followed by Huawei, IBM, VMware, Inspur and Lenovo. In the public cloud segment, ODMs once again accounted for the biggest share of the market. They also benefited from a big year-end spike in shipments to hyperscale operators, thereby enjoying a record quarter.

“Cloud service revenues grew by 39% in 2019, enterprise SaaS revenues grew by 26%, search/social networking revenues grew by 20%, and e-commerce revenues grew by 24%, all of which helped to drive increases in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Meanwhile, enterprise spending on their own data centers is being crimped by the shift in workloads to public clouds. We are already seeing server shipments to public cloud providers outstripping shipments to enterprises and that trend will continue.”