HPE and Cisco have maintained their close competition in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, Synergy Research Group said in its Q4 data.
The report showed that HPE maintained its leadership of the burgeoning cloud infrastructure equipment market, though Cisco narrowed the gap. Dell and Microsoft also presented tight competition for third place in the market.
Synergy said all four leading vendors saw sequential market share declines as IBM benefitted from its strong year-end and ODMs continued to take away business from more traditional vendors.
Across the different types of cloud deployment, Cisco continues to hold lead in public cloud infrastructure while HP leads in private cloud.
Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including hardware and software, reached well over $60 billion in 2015.
Further, the think tank said HPE has a clear lead in the cloud server segment and is a main challenger in storage, while Cisco is dominant in the networking segment and also has a rapidly growing server product line.
Microsoft features heavily in the ranking due to its position in server OS and virtualization applications, while Dell and IBM maintain a strong position across a range of cloud technology markets.
Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95 percent of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market, with the balance comprising cloud security and cloud management.
In October last year, IDC had said total spending on cloud IT infrastructure   will grow at a compound annual growth rate   of 15.1 percent and will reach $53.1 billion by 2019 accounting for 46 percent of the total spending on enterprise IT infrastructure.