Cisco dominates enterprise infrastructure, but HPE wins in data center servers

Cisco continues to gain the lion's share of enterprise infrastructure spend, controlling one-third of the overall market – but HPE is still number one for data center servers.

Cisco's dominance comes as new data from Synergy Research Group shows vendor revenues for the last four quarters declined 1% on an annualised basis, with aggregate revenue for the four quarters of US$88 billion. Revenue in each of the last 12 quarters was typically in the US$20 billion to US$23 billion range, Synergy says.

Cisco takes top spot across spend for switches and routers, network security, voice systems, WLAN, UC apps and telepresence, but is ranked just fifth in the largest segment of all – data center servers.

Top spot in that category is claimed by HPE, with Cisco managing just fifth. HPE is also ranked second in both switches and routers and WLAN.

Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst, says Cisco continues to control a third of the enterprise infrastructure market with aggregated market share of 33% across the seven categories and 'remains in a league of its own despite a variety of challenges'.

"HPE is the only broad-based competitor to challenge Cisco's dominance though it does not compete in all of the major segments," Duke says.

"The main disruption to the market is being provided by the growth of cloud and hosted solutions, which are redefining markets and enabling new competitors to emerge," he adds.

Among the vendors gaining steady market share are Palo Alto Networks in network security, Arista Networks  and Huawei in ethernet switching, HPE in WLAN and Dell EMC in servers, where it is now second ranked.

Synergy Research Group says WLAN is the fastest growing segment, while switches and routers are the second largest segment and saw growth of 1%.

Avaya was second in enterprise voice systems, Juniper second in network security, Microsoft second in UC applications and Polycom taking second in telepresence.