Enterprise IT Infrastructure Spending Jumped 13% In 2018
Cisco maintains a big lead.
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across six key enterprise infrastructure segments, vendor revenues for the last four quarters increased by almost 13% on an annualized basis, as aggregate revenues for the last four quarters reached $125 billion. Data center servers comprise the largest segment of the market and it was also the highest-growth segment, up almost 26% due to more highly featured configurations and higher ASPs. Switches & routers is the second-largest segment and it experienced growth of 3%. Hosted & cloud collaboration was the second highest growth segment, up 22% and benefitting in part due to a decrease in spending on on-premise collaboration products. Meanwhile spending on both network security and WLAN increased moderately from the previous year.
Cisco remains the dominant enterprise vendor, being the market leader in most of the segments. In aggregate across all of the segments Cisco’s market share over the last four quarters was 23%, down two percentage points from the preceding four quarters. This was due primarily to the large and substantially higher growth server segment, where Cisco is only ranked as the fifth placed vendor. Across the other segments, its market share remained relatively constant. HPE is the second ranked enterprise vendor with a market share of 11% across the six segments. It is the leader in data center servers, the number two ranked vendor in WLAN and ranked third in switches & routers. Beyond these two, other vendors who lead or are ranked second in the segments are Dell EMC (enterprise data center servers), Huawei (switches and routers), Microsoft (collaboration), and Check Point (network security). Other major vendors who have achieved particularly high 2018 growth rates in these highly competitive markets include Lenovo, Inspur, twilio, RingCentral, Ubiquiti and Palo Alto Networks.