HP Leads Charge As Cloud Infrastructure Equipment Sales Soar In 2011

cloud infrastructure equipment

Synergy Research Group this week released its Cloud Market Share Report, examining quarterly market share, sizing and forecasts for public and private cloud equipment markets, which includes networking, compute and storage platforms for the cloud.

Synergy's glimpse into the cloud equipment sales market in the first half of the year ranks HP as No. 1 with 19.87 percent of the market share. Rounding out the top five are IBM, with 17.98 percent; Dell, with 14.73 percent; Cisco with 10.44 percent; and Oracle with 5.22 percent. And across the different cloud equipment segments the market leaders vary. For example, Cisco is the dominate network infrastructure provider for cloud deployments with 50 percent of the market share, while HP and IBM represent more tan 50 percent market share combined for virtualized computing systems. Additionally, Dell, NetApp and HP make up 50 percent of the cloud storage infrastructure equipment market.

In the first half of 2011, the cloud equipment market exceeded $17 billion in sales, aided by the sales of private cloud platforms, which was the fastest growing segment with more than 30 percent annual growth. According to Synergy, private cloud platforms, is defined as a virtualized data center residing behind an organization's firewall, will continue to grow as enterprises realize the economies of scale and other cost benefits brought upon by data center virtualization.

Meanwhile, Synergy found public cloud platforms represent the largest portion of cloud equipment spending, representing 56 percent of cloud equipment spend in the first half of this year. And exponential growth is expected in coming years as offerings like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS start to gain wider adoption among businesses and consumers.

"Cloud unleashes the power of utility computing that has never been seen before and it becomes a game changer when matched with advanced communications and applications," Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder and chief analyst, said in a statement. "From small start ups being able to access massive scale computing facilities to new cloud-based consumer services, cloud will continue to open up a wealth of opportunities for innovation."