Beancounters at Canalys have added up some numbers and divided them by the flight ration of a swallow carrying a coconut and reached the conclusion that channel firms dominated 2017 infrastructure 
sments worldwide and boosted the market to a record year.
The analyst outfit said that the market was worth $142 billion this year which is a seven percent increase on 2016. Servers grew 12.2 percent to $66 billion; networking grew 4.3 percent to $50 billion and storage 1.6 percent to $26 billion. .
Canalys principal analyst Matthew Ball said the channel continued to dominate infrastructure shipments, collectively representing 74 percent of the worldwide total.
Server growth was partially due to hyperscale cloud service providers’ “ongoing” datacentre expansion, Canalys’ announcement said. It noted: “The start of a new enterprise refresh cycle following the launch of the next generation of Intel and AMD processors increased server shipment value.”
The growth of Chinese and Taiwanese ODM server vendors selling large volumes to cloud service providers meant that direct sales grew faster than channel sales in the overall infrastructure market. Ball said that 34 percent of server shipments were direct sales (compared to 19 percent of storage and 20 percent of networking shipments).
“The massive CapEx planned by the data centre cloud service providers in upgrading and expanding existing data centres, as well as increasing their geographic presence, will maintain this trend in 2018”, Ball said.
Storage, meanwhile, saw a return to growth following “a period of disruption” from all-flash and software-defined, which Canalys says offset traditional HDD storage arrays’ drop.
Canalys highlighted the strength of datacenter switching and 11ac Wave 2 wireless LANs (WLANs) for campus and branch environments. It says ethernet switching grew seven percent and WLANs nine percent. Service provider routing stayed positive at one percent, while enterprise routing fell nine percent.
Cisco, Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) represented 50 percent of infrastructure shipments Cisco maintained a 20 percent lead thanks to its networking strength. Dell EMC grew its infrastructure shipments market share to 15 percent and “was one of the fastest-growing vendors through the channel”, Ball said. HPE controlled 14 percent market share.
