Data centre infrastructure spending reached a staggering $114 billion over the last four quarters.
Software’s share of the market now accounts for 23% of the total with Microsoft dominating accounting for 72% of software revenue with VMware 17% and all others accounting for only 11%.
On the hardware side, there is a much broader range of vendors, with the top four accounting for 54% of revenues in aggregate. HP comes out on top with a 19% share, with Cisco and Dell tied on 12% each and IBM just behind on 11%.
These findings come from Synergy Research Group Q1 data and reveal a 6% rise in spending compared to the previous four quarters. Software has rapidly grown by 14% and hardware by 4%.
Spending on data centre infrastructure includes, servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualisation applications.
Breaking down the individual segments reveals that the highest growth was seen in virtualisation applications, server OS, blade servers and storage applications.
Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder & Chief Analyst, said: "Clearly the single biggest driver of spend on data center infrastructure is the boom in cloud computing. The shift in computing workloads to public and private clouds is driving huge investments in both service provider and enterprise data centers."
Although cloud is clearly influencing some of the changes in spending within data centre infrastructure, John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst & Research Director at Synergy, said: "The industry and media focus on cloud does tend to hide the fact that almost half of all data center investment is still accounted for by traditional non-cloud applications.
"That part of the data center market remains enormous and will remain a prime source of revenue for vendors for many years to come."
