The rise of hyperscale
Hyperscale operators ploughed more than $22 billion in capital expenditure in the final quarter of 2017, meaning total spend for the year reached almost $75 billion.
The figures, provided by Synergy Research Group, showed a 19% year on year growth as operators continued to build and expand their data centre footprints. Overall, the number of hyperscale data centres now tops 400.
The top five spenders were Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook who between them account for over 70% of spend in the final quarter of 2017. The top 10 spenders was made up of the likes of Alibaba, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Tencent.
Across the whole hyperscale footprint, 2017 capex equated to around 7% of total revenues, with the top five spending on aggregate well over $13 billion per quarter. Capex more than doubled at Alibaba and spend from the likes of Oracle and SAP was also above average.
AWS dominates cloud infrastructure
Overall, Amazon continued to dominate spend on cloud infrastructure services, which includes Infrastructure-as-a-Service, platform-as-a-service, hosted and private cloud. Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all increased their share of the worldwide market too, all at the expense of smaller players.
IBM maintained its position as the third largest cloud provider, behind Amazon and Microsoft, while Google was just behind, according to SRG. Alibaba, meanwhile, joined the top five cloud operators for the first time as it saw its cloud revenues double.
UC continues to rise
Growth in the unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market also continued unabated, according to 2017 figures released by Synergy, with more than 300,000 subscriber seats added to the global installed base in Q4 2017. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of strong growth and the sector is now growing by 29% per year.
Mitel and RingCentral continued to battle for market leadership, with the former showing stronger growth in the quarter, although still not topping RingCentral in terms of seat numbers.
The two accounted for well over half of all seat growth in the quarter, SRG said, with 8x8 and Fuze ranked third and fourth respectively. 8x8 is the third largest in terms of installed base, with Cisco/Broadsoft fourth.
Collaborate and listen
The collaboration market also reached an all-time high in 2017 of just shy of $10 billion in revenues, driven by a tight battle at the top between Cisco and Microsoft.
Total Q4 revenues include enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks and a range of hosted/cloud communications and applications. Hosted/cloud saw a significant 26% growth while premise-based declined by 4%.
Cisco’s market share stayed relatively stable across the four quarters of 2017, while Microsoft saw its share grow as the year progressed, with the former topping the latter by less than a percentage point in Q4.
Cisco still has a significant lead in the premise-based collaboration market, but Microsoft is dominant in the hosted/cloud sections, according to Synergy figures. IBM and Avaya then follow in third and fourth, respectively, but are some way behind in terms of market share.
Beyond the top four vendors, other major players in the market include Mitel, Google, Polycom, LogMeIn, Genesys, AT&T, Verizon, RingCentral, UNIFY and ALE.
