Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco and Microsoft continued to dominate the data center infrastructure market in Q3, as sales continued to rise, hitting US$29 billion.

Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst, says data centers are the foundation of cloud services, and this has driven annual spending on data center networking, compute and storage toward the US$120 billion mark.

While enterprise hardware accounts for more than half of the data center infrastructure market, it is service provider hardware which is experiencing the highest growth, up more than 20% in Q3 and growing ‘very strongly' Synergy Research says.

“The mass adoption of public cloud services has created the need for widespread deployment of hyperscale data centers and has led to record spending on service provider data center equipment,” Duke says.

“While the market dynamics are different for private cloud, it too will drive enormous changes in the investment patterns for enterprise data center hardware, software and services,” he adds.

Cisco leads the way on the service provider front, thanks to its dominance of data center networking and its rapidly growing server business. HPE was second, with Dell third.

The larger enterprise data center hardware segment sees HPE leading, extending its share to 24% in Q3. Dell was second in enterprise, followed by Cisco.

Data Center software – the smallest of the three segments – is ‘totally dominated' by Microsoft, with VMware the only other vendor with a substantive market share.

Synergy Research says data center infrastructure includes servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualisation software.

Some of the highest growth among the individual product segments was seen in virtualisation software, blade servers and integrated security platforms, Synergy Research says.

Rack servers, however, accounted for the largest single product segment, with 34% of the total market.