Big four cloud players flexing muscle in server space - analyst

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon begin to wield 'significant influence' on infrastructure market, says Dell'Oro

The big four cloud computing firms will begin to "have a significant influence" on the server market as they account for a large and growing portion of total shipments.

That is the view of networking and comms market watcher Dell'Oro Group, a report from which finds that, in the first quarter of 2014, 17 per cent of North American server shipments were white-box servers. Such units are non-major brand technology primarily used by system builders and integrators.

Alan Weckel, vice president at the analyst, estimated that about one in four of all server shipments were accounted for by cloud providers. He claimed that, while numerous hosting firms surely played a part in the server market's solid showing in Q1, the leading quarter of public cloud players – Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – are collectively becoming a major force.

"While many cloud providers contributed to the strong results, we believe the ‘big four'... are reaching the point where their purchasing is so large that they can have a significant influence on the overall market," he explained.

Recent numbers from IDC found that first-quarter global server shipments grew 2.1 per cent annually year on year to 2.1 million. But overall revenues fell back 2.2 per cent year on year as lower-end volume systems took precedence over more advanced models.

Volume system revenue grew 3.9 per cent annually during the quarter, claims IDC, but the mid-range and high-end segments endured sales rollbacks of 4.8 and 25.6 per cent respectively.