Dell's acquisition of EMC has positioned the newly combined companies, now known as Dell Technologies, among the leaders on all major fronts for supplying technology to build cloud systems, according to a report released Tuesday by Synergy Research Group.
Synergy's compilation of Q2 financial disclosures reveals that had Dell and EMC been tabulated together in the quarter, the combined entity would have been nipping on the heels of the two dominant players in cloud hardware.
Dell Technologies, the company formed last week after the $65 billion acquisition officially closed, is also a cloud software powerhouse through its majority stake in VMware, the second largest supplier of infrastructure software to cloud builders.
[Related: Behind The Numbers: Synergy Research Breaks Down $110B Cloud Market]
Dell's post-merger prominence in supplying cloud infrastructure is especially significant considering stagnant data center spending, which has averaged about $29 billion for the last nine quarters, according to Synergy.
"This is a vitally important battleground for vendors as the huge market continues to be driven by aggressive adoption of both public and private clouds," said John Dinsdale, Synergy's research director.
The market for vendors of servers, operating systems, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software increasingly depends on sales to cloud providers, the only data center category for which spending is rising. And an increasingly larger share of that spending is coming from the hyperscale operators, a trend that will continue for some time, according to Jeremy Duke, Synergy's founder and chief analyst.
The cloud hardware market has long featured a tight, and exclusive, horse race between Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Cisco and HPE have long offered a one-two punch on the public and private cloud sides of the market. In the second quarter of 2016, counting all cloud hardware sales—both for public and private installations—HPE led the field with 15 percent market share, a tick above Cisco's 14 percent.
Combined sales from both Dell and EMC in the quarter before their deal closed added up to 13 percent share for the joint entity for public and private cloud technology sales.
Cisco had roughly 15 percent share of Q2 sales to public cloud operators with HPE closer to 11 and Dell Technologies just under 10.