Enterprise networking vendor Cisco has retained its lead in the cloud infrastructure equipment market in Q1 2014, said Synergy Research Group.
Share of Cisco in the cloud infrastructure equipment market was 14.8 percent, while HP market share dipped to 13.7 percent.
IBM share declined due to falling server revenues. This is primarily due to the fact that IBM is in the process of selling much of the product line.
The size of the cloud infrastructure equipment was nearly $10 billion.
The report said Cisco’s leadership is mainly due to its dominance of the networking segment and its 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 percent 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.
Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst, said: “IBM will 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.”
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.