Dell, Microsoft, Inspur, Huawei Lead Data Center Cloud Spending

‘The mix of spending by public cloud providers and enterprises continues to shift substantially in favor of cloud,’ says John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

Global spending on data center infrastructure is rapidly shifting from being enterprise-led to the public cloud with China-based companies Inspur and Huawei benefitting from this massive spending shift compared to U.S.-based vendors Dell Technologies and Microsoft.

Worldwide data center hardware and software spending on public cloud infrastructure skyrocketed 22 percent annually in 2020 to roughly $71 billion, according to new data by market research firm Synergy Research Group. Meanwhile, global data center hardware and software spending by enterprises dropped 6 percent annually in 2020 to roughly $94 billion.

“The total data center equipment market continues to grow steadily and we forecast that it will continue to do so over the next five years,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group in an email to CRN. “However, the mix of spending by public cloud providers and enterprises continues to shift substantially in favor of cloud.”

[Related: Microsoft Will Build Up To 100 New Data Centers Each Year]

Worldwide data center infrastructure revenues including both cloud and non-cloud hardware and software reached $165 billion in 2020, up 4 percent year over year. Public cloud infrastructure spending accounted for 43 percent of the total market, while enterprise spending accounted for 57 percent, according to Synergy.

With cloud providers investing heavily in their data centers to meet the ever-increasing demand for cloud services, Dinsdale predicts that public cloud spending on data centers will soon surpass enterprise spending.

“In the server segment of the market, unit shipments to public cloud providers have already surpassed enterprise volumes. Currently the value of the enterprise server market is still greater due to higher ASPs, but that too will soon change as public cloud server volumes continue to surge,” said Dinsdale.

It is key to note the different market leading vendors in both data center segments.

For public cloud infrastructure, Inspur and Huawei gained share and now have similar market share to Dell Technologies. Synergy did not release exact market share percentages but said, “In terms of growth, Inspur, Huawei and ODMs were clearly the big winners,” in 2020.

In the enterprise, Microsoft leads the global data center infrastructure market, followed by Dell in second place. Ranking third in the enterprise is Hewlett Packard Enterprise, followed by Cisco and VMware, according to Synergy’s data.

Dell is the overall leader in terms of server and storage revenues, with Inspur being the clear leader in server sales to public cloud providers.

Cisco is the dominant market leader in the networking segment, while Microsoft features heavily in the rankings due to its position in server OS and virtualization applications.

Public cloud titans Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google are spending billions each quarter building and equipping new data centers across the globe. AWS, Google and Microsoft, collectively, now account for more than 50 percent of the world’s largest data centers.