VMware leads the cloud system management software market, controlling 21.7 percent of the $4 billion market, according to IDC. Microsoft ranks No. 2 (14.1 percent), followed by IBM (9.2 percent), BMC (6.4 percent), and Cisco (6.1 percent).

The total worldwide cloud system management software market revenue grew to $4.2 billion in 2017, an 18 percent year-over-year increase, according to IDC. VMware's cloud business had revenues of $906.7 million.

The need to manage performance, capacity, and costs, and automate operations across hybrid and multicloud environments drove this market growth, said Stephen Elliot, program vice president, management software and DevOps at IDC.

Cisco gained market share last year in part because of its AppDynamics acquisition in March 2017, the report says. Other application performance management and IT operations analytics vendors including New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were some of the fastest-growing companies on the list. IDC also singles out ServiceNow and Oracle, which it says showed significant growth in their unified, software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platforms. Revenue from SaaS-based products increased 25 percent, compared to on-premises cloud management software, which grew just under 18 percent.

VMware ranked No. 1 in the cloud systems management category for the fifth straight year, and it also leads IDC’s new automation and configuration management category, published in June. At 20.7 percent growth year over year, VMware’s revenue grew faster than the overall cloud management market.

It’s worth noting that IDC’s figures don’t reflect VMware’s CloudHealth Technologies acquisition, which closed earlier this month.

CloudHealth provides a cloud operations platform across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It has more than 3,000 customers including Yelp, Dow Jones, Zendesk, Skyscanner, and SHI.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger first announced the CloudHealth deal on stage at VMworld in August and said it gives VMware “the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry.”