Enterprise IT infrastructure spending jumped 13 percent in 2018

Across six key enterprise infrastructure segments, vendor revenues for the last four quarters increased by almost 13 percent on an annualized basis, as aggregate revenues for the last four quarters reached USD 125 billion, states Synergy Research Group. Data center servers comprise the largest segment of the market and it was also the highest-growth segment, up almost 26 percent due to more highly featured configurations and higher ASPs. Switches and routers are the second-largest segments and it experienced growth of 3 percent. Hosted and cloud collaboration was the second highest growth segment, up 22 percent 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 percent, 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 percent across the six segments. It is the leader in data center servers, the number two ranked vendor in WLAN and ranked third in switches and 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).