HPE, Cisco and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are enjoying a comfortable lead in the cloud infrastructure market -- one that includes private cloud hardware, public cloud hardware and cloud infrastructure. A new Synergy Research report revealed that HPE led Cisco in the first quarter and slightly widened the gap between the two, although both vendors gained market share in the quarter. HPE and Cisco were trailed by Microsoft, Dell, IBM, EMC, VMware, Lenovo and Huawei. Overall, the total cloud market has been growing 20 percent per year, but Synergy noted that the growth rate dropped to 13 percent in the first quarter due to traditional seasonality.
Over the last eight quarters, total data center infrastructure spending -- a market that includes servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software -- has been running at an average $29 billion. Cloud adoption is increasingly driving growth in data center spending and now account for over half of the total data center infrastructure market. Release