New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco and HP are now tied for market leadership in the rapidly growing cloud infrastructure equipment market. HP’s growth over the last four quarters has slightly outpaced Cisco’s, allowing it to close the gap on its prime competitor. In Q1 each vendor had a little over 13% worldwide market share, followed in the ranking by Microsoft, Dell, IBM, EMC, VMware, and Lenovo. Across the different types of cloud deployment, Cisco has a clear lead in public cloud infrastructure while HP leads in private cloud. Total Q1 cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including both hardware and software, were over $14.5 billion, having grown by 25% year on year.

Cisco’s leadership in public cloud equipment is due mainly to its dominance of the networking segment and its rapidly growing position in servers. HP’s private cloud leadership is due to dominating the market for cloud servers and being a main challenger in storage. Microsoft and VMware feature heavily in the total cloud equipment ranking is due to their respective positions in server OS and virtualization applications, while IBM maintains a strong position across a range of cloud markets. Servers, OS, storage and networking combined account for 89% of the cloud infrastructure market, with the balance comprising cloud security, cloud management and virtualization applications.

“With both public and private cloud usage booming we are seeing surging investment in infrastructure to build clouds,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “While Cisco and HP are clearly benefitting from this boom they are not the only ones. Several other vendors have seen year-on-year cloud revenue growth rates in excess of 20%, while ODMs are also benefitting from hyperscale cloud providers outsourcing the supply of their own-designed hardware.”

This article was originally posted “Report: Cisco And HP Tied For Cloud Infrastructure Equipment Leadership In Q1” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.