The world’s biggest technology vendors’ battles over market share, rankings, and overall bragging rights continued in 2020, and this year the feuds stretched from the clouds to court and even to a galaxy far, far away. We saw Cisco and VMware duel over SD-WAN, while Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise moved beyond hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to cloud-delivered everything. However, the ongoing VMware-Nutanix feud stole the show with VMware filing an 11th-hour lawsuit against the new Nutanix CEO with just three days left until 2021.

Here are some of our favorite battles of 2020. This doesn’t mean they were won or lost, and most of them are just a single battle in a larger war that’s far from over. We expect them to continue well into 2021 — and beyond, for some — and we’ll be keeping a watchful eye on all as we head into the new year.

Cisco and VMware compete in multiple IT sectors, but perhaps the biggest battle between the two in 2020 centered around SD-WAN. Both companies bought SD-WAN vendors in 2017 with VMware scooping up VeloCloud and Cisco buying Viptela, and they’ve essentially been in a “two-horse race” for the No. 1 SD-WAN vendor spot ever since.

The race heated up this year when in April VMware said more than 225,000 branch offices have deployed its SD-WAN. “We are the No. 1 vendor in SD-WAN,” said Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit. “Now for 20 years, there’s been another big networking company down on Tasman Drive that has absolutely dominated branch office — like 70, 80% market share,” Gillis continued. He didn’t name the competitor, but he’s talking about Cisco, which has a campus on Tasman Drive in San Jose, California. “All of a sudden we’re No. 1,” Gillis said. “How did this happen? I think because of the power of virtualization.”

The next day Cisco struck back against VMware’s No. 1 SD-WAN vendor claims with a blog post touting its SD-WAN market leadership. “Dell’Oro continues to place Cisco as the No. 1 in SD-WAN market share,” wrote Cisco VP Muninder Sambi. “Cisco was also just named a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for WAN Edge Infrastructure.”

Sambi’s referring to a report Dell’Oro Group published in March that ranks Cisco No. 1 and VMware No. 2. Cisco claimed 20,000 SD-WAN customers across its Viptela and Meraki product lines as of its first fiscal quarter of 2020.

However, a week later Omdia published its Data Center Network Equipment Market Tracker, which put VMware back on top. That report indicates that VMware led the worldwide SD-WAN market with the highest revenue share (16.3%), followed by Cisco (13%), and Fortinet (12.3%). These rankings seemed to hold for the rest of the year with another Dell’Oro Group SD-WAN market share report published earlier this month putting VMware, Cisco, and Fortinet in the top three spots, and in that order.

The VMware-Nutanix battle moved beyond name calling in the blogosphere and into court in 2020.

In the past, former Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey called VMware COO Sanjay Poonen a “bully.” Meanwhile, Poonen has called Nutanix a “copycat,” and accused the HCI pioneer of carrying out a “vitriolic” and “frontal attack on both VMware Dell.” Still, the competitors always insisted they had nothing but “respect” for each other — until December, that is.

In a surprise move ahead of the Nutanix’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Pandey announced he would leave the company he co-founded in 2009 once the board of directors selected his successor. The board made its choice in December. Early in the month, Nutanix hired former VMware COO Rajiv Ramaswami as its new CEO effective Dec. 14.

Two weeks later, on Dec. 28, VMware filed a lawsuit against Ramaswami alleging that he breached his legal and contractual duties to VMware by “secretly meeting” with Nutanix’s top brass while working with VMware’s leadership to shape that company’s strategy. Nutanix maintains that neither it nor Ramaswami did anything illegal: “VMware’s lawsuit seeks to make interviewing for a new job wrongful.”

We expect more legal filings in early 2021.

Dell and HPE’s rivalry stretches back to their hardware roots in servers and storage but, in recent years, has shifted increasingly to software-defined everything. This includes hyperconverged and composable infrastructure as well as edge computing. And, in 2020, the companies added cloud-delivered everything to the battlefield. When Dell’s cloud-delivered services took center stage at its Dell Technologies World 2020 event, HPE wasted no time firing return shots.

Dell first rolled out its pay-as-you-go infrastructure program, which is similar to HPE’s GreenLake portfolio, at last year’s Dell Technologies World. At this year’s event, executives rebranded this effort as Project Apex. However, the company hasn’t yet said when this shift to as a service will be completed.

HPE, meanwhile, started its as-a-service pivot about three years ago. CEO Antonio Neri previously said GreenLake is HPE’s fastest-growing business, and he has pledged to offer HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022.

Shortly after Dell’s Project Apex announcement, Keith White, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake, wrote in an email to SDxCentral that “it’s important to distinguish between Dell’s ‘new way’ to finance infrastructure and the true cloud experience on-prem that customers are really looking for … HPE GreenLake is the cloud experience that comes to you.”

It sounds really similar to Dell’s pitch. “Cloud is an operating model,” said Deepak Patil, SVP for cloud platforms and solutions at Dell Technologies, in an earlier interview. “It’s not a destination.” Hmmm.

After years of drama surrounding the $10 billion cloud computing deal, in late 2019 the Department of Defense (DoD) awarded its contentious Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to Microsoft — a surprise victory over larger rival Amazon Web Services (AWS). But the battle continued into 2020. In January, Amazon filed a motion to stop Microsoft’s JEDI contract work with the Pentagon until a court ruled on Amazon’s earlier legal challenge. A judge sided with Amazon and ordered Microsoft to cease work on the $10 billion project.

Then, a few months later, Amazon filed a second protest and vowed it “won’t back down” in the JEDI fight. Microsoft’s response: “stop asking for a do-over.” Amazon’s new legal maneuvering came just weeks after a federal judge gave the DoD 120 days to “reconsider certain aspects” of the JEDI award.

In September, the Pentagon finished its review and reaffirmed its decision to go with Microsoft. Despite its repeated rejections, Amazon continued contesting the Pentagon’s decision and claimed the award was “politically corrupted” by President Donald Trump.

Amazon fired yet another (final?) legal salvo in December, claiming that its services would cost the government less than it will end up spending with Microsoft. “AWS [is] now the lowest-priced bid by tens of millions of dollars,” a spokesperson said in an email to SDxCentral. “It’s important that the DoD fix all of the evaluation errors that remain unaddressed, and ensure they are getting access to the best technology at the best price. We had made clear that unless the DoD addressed all of the defects in its initial decision, we would continue to pursue a fair and objective review, and that’s exactly where we find ourselves today.”

And the rest of us find ourselves gearing up for more intergalactic JEDI battles in 2021.

Google, in its quest to unseat AWS or Microsoft and become a top-two cloud provider, took the fight from the clouds to the data center in 2020. And its secret weapon in the cloud wars, or Trojan Horse, depending on your perspective, is Anthos.

Anthos is a Kubernetes-based platform fully managed by Google. It allows users to manage their data and applications in an on-premises environment — or across cloud platforms from rivals like AWS and Microsoft. While Google formally launched Anthos last year, it finally expanded Anthos’ reach into AWS and Microsoft Azure, which is still in preview, this year.

While the No. 3 cloud provider’s market share continues growing faster than the overall market, it still trails behind larger rivals Amazon, with 33% of the market, and Microsoft with 18%. Google won 9% of the market in Q3 up from 8% in Q2.

During its third-quarter 2020 earnings call, executives said Google’s business, which includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), grew 45% year over year and pulled in $3.44 billion during Q3 compared to $2.38 billion a year ago.