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The last ten years saw more than US$200 billion in enterprise IT revenue generated by just eight players, who have been dubbed the decade’s “mega vendors” by an analyst firm.
Microsoft outshone its rivals considerably, generating US$50 billion in direct and channel sales since 2009 with Amazon following behind at over US$30 billion.
Collated by Synergy Research Group, the figures revealed that six of the eight players each increased their annual enterprise sector revenues by well over US$10 billion in the last 10 years, with Huawei, Dell, Cisco and Salesforce rounding off the list respectively.
Google and Adobe were also described as achieving “significant growth” in the enterprise sector, though neither surpassed more than the US$10 billion mark.
Synergy noted the figures do not necessarily reflect a ranking of the largest enterprise IT vendors but those that “moved the needle” the most in growing the market over the decade.
The analyst firm also remarked on how last year’s enterprise market was “almost unrecognisable from the one of 2009”.
“Ten years ago Amazon and Google had hardly any presence in the enterprise sector and Salesforce was still in its early days,” Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale said.” In 2019 those three collectively generated over $60 billion in revenues from enterprises.”
Although one of the world’s top players in 2009, Microsoft’s 10-year growth of 150 per cent catapulted it to the top of the rankings, Dinsdale noted.
Huawei also grew significantly due to its overseas expansion and local market targeting, while Dell swallowed up big-name vendors such as EMC and VMware, boosting its footprint.
“We now enter the new decade with a revamped list of major tech companies serving enterprise customers.”
New elite pack
In addition to the traditional giants, a number of new players have rapidly shaken up the enterprise tech field over the past decade, as 12 leave the decade with billion-dollar annual revenue run rates.
According to a separate report published by Synergy, the vendors had 2009 revenues of only around $200 million, but now have an aggregate revenue run rate of over $23 billion.
These players, which are led by Workday, ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks respectively, had combined revenues of substantially less than $100 million 2009, but can now claim a collective run rate in excess of $10 billion.
Following in the top three’s footsteps were Arista Networks, Pure Storage, Dropbox, Shopify, Atlassian, Nutanix, Twilio, Veeva and DocuSign, all of which were described as a new “elite pack”.
More than half of those ranked are software-as-a-service providers, while Dropbox and Twilio marked the emergence of collaboration tools.
“In these areas, a strong focus on specific, innovative applications can be a winning formula,” Synergy chief analyst and founder Jeremy Duke said.
“In other areas, such as networking and cloud infrastructure services, scale and a broad product portfolio tend to be more important, which makes them more difficult for startups to penetrate.”
Had Tableau not been acquired by Salesforce, it would have been in Synergy’s rankings, the report added. In addition, RingCentral, Zendesk and Box were said to be closing in on the billion-dollar milestone.
“The decade has seen a lot of consolidation in those IT markets where scale is a key to success, but that has not prevented a constant stream of innovative IT vendor startups, some of which have built a strong market position and continue to grow aggressively,” Duke added.
