Spending on data center IT hardware and software grew by 10 percent in 2021 to $185 billion, primarily thanks to 20 percent growth in spending on public cloud infrastructure, Synergy Research Group said.
Public cloud infrastructure accounts for 47 percent of the total.
Cloud providers’ spending on their own data center infrastructure grew 3 percent, following a 6 percent decline in 2020.
The main hardware-oriented segments of servers, storage and networking in aggregate accounted for 77 percent of the data center infrastructure market. OS, virtualization software, cloud management and network security account for the balance.
Dell is the overall leader in server and storage revenues.
Inspur is the leader in server sales to public cloud providers.
Cisco is dominant in the networking segment.
Microsoft features heavily in the rankings due to its position in server OS and virtualization applications. Outside of these four, the other leading vendors in the market are HPE, Huawei, VMware, Lenovo and IBM.
Inspur, Dell and Microsoft are the leading vendors in the public cloud market with similar market share. The 2021 market leaders in enterprise infrastructure were Microsoft and Dell, followed at a distance by HPE, Cisco, VMware and IBM.
