And The Tech Company Making The Most Money On The Cloud Is ... Cisco!

Cisco CEO John Chambers is hell-bent on telling the world that Cisco isn't just a network equipment maker anymore, it's an IT company that sells servers, software and lots of other stuff.

Well, here's a startling stat that helps prove his point: Cisco beat out HP and IBM to become the biggest supplier of IT products in the cloud computing market last quarter, says market researcher, Synergy Research Group.

Synergy pegged Cisco at a 15% share of the $9 billion sold in Q1.

This compared with IBM and HP at 14% apiece, Dell's 9%, EMC's 7%, VMware's 4%, NetApp's 4% and Oracle's 3%, Synergy researcher John Dinsdale told us.

Cisco's No. 1 status might not last long, warns the market researcher. Cisco benefitted in part from an "exceedingly poor" quarter for both HP's and IBM's server businesses, Dinsdale said.

But there's another interesting fact buried in the report: A huge chunk of money, some 30%, didn't go to any of the big IT vendors.

That's because the biggest Web companies aren't buying their gear from traditional vendors anymore. Companies like Google, Facebook, Rackspace are designing their own servers and hiring contract manufacturers to build them.