I’ve been looking at the enterprise IT market over the last couple of days, combining server, enterprise network and storage system numbers together mainly to assess market growth and vendor successes. With the server market growing, storage systems declining and networks somewhere in the middle it looks to me as there is good evidence that we’re moving to a server-centric world. Software running on servers is taking chunks of money out of the dedicated array market now… and will do the same to dedicated network hardware in the future. You’ll want toread more about the market movements and vendor shares.The server market in the year to the end of June was up 0.9% to $61.7b, while the enterprise network market was down 1.1% and the storage systems by 9.2% to $51.7 and $29.8n respectively. Movements were more market in Q2 itself with server revenues up 4.2%, networks down 1.5% and storage down 11.7% according to the ITCandor market model.
Each of the 3 contributing markets has its own leader – HP in servers, EMC in storage and Cisco in networks (see Figure). While Cisco’s tremendous 56.4% share in networks helps it take the leading position in the overall enterprise hardware market.
Please note that I’ve added Aruba to HP and Alcatel Lucent to Nokia in the network market share.
Each leader had positive growth and increased its market share in the year. The strongest performers in the server market were Lenovo (due to its acquisition of IBM’s System x and a strong push behind its own ThinkServer brand), Huawei (which continued its international expansion) and Cisco (whose data center strategy continues to prove popular). The table below summarises overall enterprise hardware market shares and growth for the year to the end of June.
Table – enterprise hardware market shares ($US billion) – year to the end of June 2014 and 2015
| <Q2 2014 | Share % | <Q2 2015 | Share % | Growth % | |
| Cisco | $31.14 | 21.3% | $32.37 | 22.6% | 3.9% |
| HP | $19.50 | 13.3% | $19.77 | 13.8% | 1.4% |
| Dell | $12.48 | 8.5% | $13.25 | 9.2% | 6.1% |
| IBM | $11.11 | 7.6% | $8.36 | 5.8% | -24.7% |
| EMC | $7.12 | 4.9% | $7.27 | 5.1% | 2.1% |
| Huawei | $3.76 | 2.6% | $4.59 | 3.2% | 22.1% |
| NEC | $4.62 | 3.2% | $3.80 | 2.7% | -17.8% |
| Other | $56.58 | 38.7% | $53.89 | 37.6% | -4.8% |
| Total | $146.32 | 100.0% | $143.30 | 100.0% | -2.1% |
Source: ITCandor, 2015
Of course the enterprise hardware market is a bit old-fashioned for some vendors perhaps. We’ll have a look in the next few weeks at cloud services – offerings that do without the need to ship physical products. We’ll also look at the components and software that are turning this into a server-centric and software defined world. Stay tuned…
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