Cisco has maintained leadership in the $40 billion cloud infrastructure equipment - compute, networking and storage - market for three straight quarters, according to Synergy Research Group. Cisco's share of the $10.3 billion market in Q3 was 14.6% followed ever so closely by HP (see graphic).
IBM's Q3 share was 12.9%, an historic low for the company, according to Synergy. Cisco's share was an historic high and it might climb even higher given the trends in cloud infrastructure.
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Synergy expects that the mix of spend will move slowly away from original design manufacturer-based servers towards storage and networking. This will tend to tilt the playing field more in favor of Cisco, the firm notes.
But for Q3, computing's share of cloud infrastructure equipment revenue was 52%, while networking and storage each accounted for 21%. The balance of the market consists of cloud management and cloud security, according to Synergy.
Cloud infrastructure revenue topped $10 billion for the third time in four quarters on Q3. The $10.3 billion tallied for the quarter was up 1% sequentially and 6% annually. On a rolling four quarter basis though, revenue dropped 8%.
Historically, the fourth quarter of the year has resulted in a peak in revenues for both HP and IBM, so Synergy expects the race with Cisco for leadership in the market should be a tight one at the year end.
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