Cisco Holds off HP in Leadership Battle for Cloud Infrastructure

RENO, NV, June 17, 2014

New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco held on to leadership of the cloud infrastructure equipment market and indeed marginally increased the gap between itself and second-ranked HP. Cisco, which achieved a historic market share high of 14.8%, first took over the top-ranking position in Q1 of last year. HP’s market share dropped slightly to 13.7% in the quarter, while IBM fell off the pace due to falling server revenues – an area where much of the product line is in the process of being sold off. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues for the quarter were just short of the $10 billion milestone.

Cisco’s overall leadership is due mainly to its dominance of the networking segment and its rapidly growing position in servers. HP is the market leader in cloud computing systems, a main challenger in storage and also part of the pack chasing Cisco in networking. Servers, storage and networking combined account for 91% of the cloud infrastructure market, with the balance comprising cloud security, cloud management and virtualization applications. Across the different types of cloud deployment, Cisco has a clear lead in public cloud infrastructure while HP leads in private cloud.

“Cloud infrastructure leadership is becoming a bit of a two-horse race” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “IBM will of course remain strong in many segments, but declining server sales and divestment of some product lines means that its cloud infrastructure revenues no longer match those of Cisco and HP. Meanwhile Chinese vendors will continue to take up some of the slack, with Inspur already featuring among the bigger server vendors and Lenovo soon to make a much bigger impact – providing that the IBM/Lenovo server deal gets the required regulatory approval."