Global server market grows as business IT spend increases

Global server shipments rise 3.2 per cent annually to 2.29 million, IDC finds

The worldwide server market generated $13.5bn (£8.6bn) revenues in Q2 2015, an increase of 6.1 per cent compared with the same quarter a year before, reports IDC.

Global server shipments grew by 3.2 per cent, reaching 2.29 million, which the market research body said indicates a boost of business investment in IT.
Al Gillen, programme vice president of servers and system software at IDC, said: "The recent growth trend in the server market is confirmation of the larger IT investment taking place, despite dramatic change occurring in system software thanks to open source projects such as Docker and OpenStack."

Despite the market's overall increase the western Europe server space was relatively flat, with revenues dropping by 0.3 per cent, whereas the US market saw 12.6 per cent growth.

Of the top five vendors, HP claimed the most market share with 25.4 per cent and reported revenues of $3.4bn for the second quarter of this year.

Dell saw a slight decrease in market share from 17.6 per cent in Q2 2014 to 17.5 per cent during the same quarter this year. IBM's market share also took a hit, dropping to 14.8 per cent from 23.4 per cent, with revenues falling 32.9 per cent year on year to $1.9bn.

Lenovo and Cisco completed the top five, increasing their market share to seven per cent and 6.4 per cent respectively.

IDC reports that Cisco's 19.3 per cent Q2 2015 revenue growth is above average, suggesting that the vendor will continue to cultivate its share of the server market going forward.

IDC's research manager of enterprise servers Kuba Stolarski said: "As customers look to the future, alternatives to contemporary IT solutions reside not just in chip architecture, but throughout the value chain: from software-defined solutions to disaggregation and composable systems; to network-deployed, edge-enabled IoT compute - the server market landscape is changing dramatically."