Even with laying off employees and splitting HP into two separate companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is enjoying a commanding lead in the enterprise data center hardware market, according to a report by Synergy Research Group.

In the other two sectors, according to Synergy, Cisco is the market leader for service provider data center hardware while Microsoft is on top of the data center software market.

Enterprise hardware accounts for more than half of the data center infrastructure market, says Synergy. In the third quarter, HPE extended its lead in that sector while growing its market share to 24 percent.

Cisco rules the roost in service provider data center hardware thanks to its growth in data center networking and its growing server business. The large-scale adoption of public cloud services has created the need for deployments of hyperscale data centers, which in turn has led to record spending on service provider data center spending, according to the report.

Synergy Research Group says that the data center software market is the smallest of the three segments. Microsoft is dominating that sector with VMware the only other vendor with significant market share.

As defined by the report, data center infrastructure is comprised of servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security, and virtualization software. Overall, the total amount spent in the third quarter on data center infrastructure grew by 3 percent year-over-year to $29 billion. Most of that growth is in service provider hardware, which enjoyed a 20 percent growth spurt.

Within the individual product segments, the areas of the highest growth include virtualization software, blade servers, and integrated security platforms. The biggest single product segment is rack servers, which account for 34 percent of the total market.