Microsoft Dominates In Data Centre Software Revenues

Microsoft is at the top of the data centre software market, claiming a 72 percent market share from the second quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2015.

This is according to Synergy Research Group, which released figures this week outlining the data centre infrastructure market showing the potential strength of Microsoft’s data centre game.

$114 billion

The figures show that over the last four quarters, spend on data centre infrastructure hit $114 billion (£72bn). In terms of software, Microsoft came out on top for hauling in customers’ infrastructure pounds, followed by VMware with 17 percent of the software infrastructure market share. Both firms make up almost 90 percent of software revenues.

But out of the $114 billion, software spending only accounted for 23 percent of the total infrastructure spend, according to Synergy. The rest was made up by hardware spend.

On the hardware side of the data centre, Synergy suggests it’s more than just a one horse race. HP stakes a 19 percent hardware market share, followed by Cisco’s 12 percent. Dell is also sitting at 12 percent with IBM just a notch behind at 11 percent.

These top four companies, in aggregate, account for 54 percent of revenues. Other strong data centre vendors include EMC, Lenovo, NetApp, Oracle, Fujitsu and Hitachi, said Synergy.

“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,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder.

The infrastructure spend study looked at servers, server operating systems, storage, networking, network security and virtualisation applications. Synergy said that total spend on data centre infrastructure over the four-quarter period grew by 6 percent relative to the previous four quarters, with software growing by 14 percent and hardware growing by 4 percent. Among the individual segments some of the highest growth was seen in virtualisation applications, server OS, blade servers and storage applications.

Cloud

But Synergy analyst John Dinsdale said that the media’s focus on cloud computing seems to hide the fact that almost half of all data centre investment is from non-cloud applications.

“That part of the data centre market remains enormous and will remain a prime source of revenue for vendors for many years to come,” said Dinsdale.

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