The data center infrastructure market last year reached an all-time high spurred by increased spending on public cloud infrastructure, according to data from Synergy Research Group.

Following a couple of years of flat sales, the market surged 10% in 2021. “The total data center equipment market continues to expand with overall 2021 growth rate picking up after two relatively subdued years," John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, wrote in a new report.

Public cloud infrastructure spend jumped 20% last year in tandem with the growing demand for public cloud services, the market research firm reported. ODMs cornered the largest piece of the public cloud market in 2021, followed by Inspur, Dell, and Microsoft as leading individual vendors with similar market share.

Microsoft and Dell led the enterprise infrastructure market, followed distantly by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Cisco, VMware, and IBM.

"The biggest story is the ever-increasing share of the market that is accounted for by sales to public cloud providers, who now account for almost half of all spending on data center gear," Dinsdale wrote.

Data center cloud and non-cloud hardware and software revenues hit $185 billion last year, and spending on public cloud infrastructure represented 47% of that total, according to the market research firm. In terms of data center hardware, spending on servers, storage, and networking accounted for 77% of the total, and the remainder was associated with operating systems, virtualization software, cloud management, and network security.

Dell led the overall server and storage segments of the market in terms of revenue, while Inspur dominated server sales to public cloud providers. Cisco led among networking vendors, and Microsoft's position in server OS and virtualization deemed it a leading vendor. Additional leading vendors in the market were HPE, VMware, Lenovo, and IBM, the report found.

Dinsdale expects these market trends to persist over the next five years and anticipates double-digit annual growth in cloud providers' sales will offset "a somewhat flat enterprise market," he wrote.