Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) continue to duke it out for supremacy in the cloud infrastructure market, with the latter company gaining a slight edge over the former, according to new research from Synergy Research Group.

Synergy’s latest note is based on the most recent Q1 data, and shows that Cisco edges out HPE and Dell Inc. when it comes to public cloud hardware. However, HPE enjoys a fairly dominant position in the private cloud hardware space, with more than 20 percent of the overall market. When it comes to cloud software, Microsoft maintains a big lead with its 40 percent share, which is more than double that of second-place vendor VMware Inc. Even so, the relatively nascent size of the cloud software market means Microsoft trails Cisco and HPE by some distance in the overall cloud infrastructure space.

HPE actually increased its lead over Cisco in the last quarter, even as both companies expanded their market share, Synergy said. It was a good quarter for the cloud infrastructure market overall too – the segment grew by 13 percent in Q1, a solid performance for what is a “typically soft” quarter that follows the Q4 peak.

Synergy’s note comes just days after a study from application performance control system vendor VMTurbo Inc. found that many companies are far from ready to make a complete transition to the public cloud. The study indicated that more than half of organizations surveyed do not currently have a multi-cloud strategy in place, while others were reluctant to go all in on the public cloud due to customer requests and compliance issues.

Synergy’s founder and chief analyst Jeremy Duke said that even though spending on cloud services and Software-as-a-Service is growing by 50 percent and 30 percent a year, respectively, on-premises IT systems will remain a fixture at most organizations for some time to come.

“There is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” Duke said. “But on the enterprise data center side too, we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

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