Microsoft, AWS Big Leaders Among Enterprise IT Vendors in 2021

Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominated enterprise IT vendors in terms of revenue and growth in 2021.

That’s according to Synergy Research Group. It identified 13 vendors that generated over $25 billion in annual revenues from sales of technology to enterprises and service providers.

John Dinsdale is a chief analyst at Synergy Research.

Synergy Research Group’s John Dinsdale

“The performance of the technology titans was a bit of a mixed bag in 2021,” he said. “But the good news is that only Huawei saw its revenues decline and that was due to factors that were largely beyond its control. Across a broad swath of enterprise technology markets, vendors saw double-digit revenue growth. Cloud and software-oriented markets were the standout performers, driving stellar growth for AWS, Microsoft and Salesforce. Vendors whose sales are focused primarily on more traditional on-premises products or infrastructure will continue to have a hard time generating exciting levels of growth.”

Microsoft led by a wide margin with annual revenues of $120 billion from its enterprise customers. IBM was second, followed by AWS, Huawei and Cisco.

In terms of annual revenue growth, AWS led the way with 36% growth. It was followed by Salesforce and Microsoft. Each grew their revenues by well over 20%.

None of the other leaders managed to achieve double-digit growth rates, with Cisco coming the closest.

Huawei Only Loser in 2021

At the other end of the spectrum, Huawei saw its revenues from enterprise and service provider customers fall by 9%. It was hurt by geopolitical issues and technology supply restrictions.

Ericsson’s and Nokia’s revenues were mostly flat, demonstrating the relative weakness of service provider sales compared with the enterprise sector.

In aggregate, the 13 vendors generated 2021 revenues of $613 billion from enterprise and service provider customers, up 10% from 2020. The full-year 2021 revenue numbers represent actual data for the first three quarters of the year and a forecast of fourth-quarter activity levels.

The larger market segments include cloud infrastructure services, collaboration, enterprise software/SaaS, data center infrastructure, service provider infrastructure and enterprise IT services. Cloud infrastructure services, SaaS, hosted and cloud collaboration, and service provider data center infrastructure were the highest-growing segments.