But 2016 is particularly "notable as the year in which spend on cloud services overtook spend on cloud infrastructure hardware and software," the Synergy report said. "In aggregate cloud service markets are now growing three times more quickly than cloud infrastructure hardware and software."

Global cloud providers and corporate data center operators spent more than $65 billion in 2016 on the hardware and software needed to build out their cloud infrastructure. More than half of that spending came from enterprises building their own private clouds.

But spending on private data centers only crawled upward in 2016 – an uptick of less than 5 percent. HPE and Dell EMC were the market leaders, in that order.

Spending on infrastructure for powering public clouds grew faster than 20 percent and those operators were buying more equipment from Cisco, followed by HPE, than any other vendors.

Cloud-based communications also took in between $4 billion and $5 billion, representing market growth above 15 percent. The emerging Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) sector was led by Cisco, followed by the GoTo portfolio that Citrix Systems spun off last year.

"UCaaS, while in many ways a different type of market, is also growing steadily and driving some radical changes in business communications," the report stated.

"We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream, and I’d say that 2016 is the year that cloud started to dominate many IT market segments," Synergy Research Group founder Jeremy Duke said in a statement accompanying the report.

“Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, especially on the public cloud side. Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for technology vendors and cloud service providers, and yet there are still many years of strong growth ahead,” Duke said.