Server revenue drops as enterprises stall - IDC and Gartner

Enterprises are struggling to decide their next moves, according to market watchers

Worldwide server sales continued to drop in Q4 2016, according to both Gartner and IDC.

The market watchers both reported declining revenues for the market in the final quarter of last year, with Gartner saying revenue dropped 1.9 per cent; while IDC stated a 4.6 per cent plummet.

Gartner reported revenue for the period of $14.8bn (£12bn), while IDC estimated it to be $14.6bn.

Gartner and IDC were united in attributing the decline partly to the lack of activity from enterprises.

"The server market suffered another difficult quarter as most segments declined, including hyperscale deployments, suggesting that the weakness previously seen is more systemic," said Kuba Stolarski, research director of computing platforms at IDC.

"Some public cloud datacentre deployments are being delayed and there are indications that overall levels of deployment and refresh may slow down even through the long term as hyperscalers continue to evaluate their hardware provisioning criteria.

"On the enterprise side, we are seeing ongoing weakness as companies struggle to decide whether to deploy workloads on premises or off, and continue to consolidate existing workloads on fewer servers."

Gartner, however, said that hyperscalers such as Google and Facebook actually grew their activity and drove "significant server replacements".

HPE lead, but loses market share

HPE maintained its position as the top server vendor worldwide, with revenue of $3.4m in Q4 - but this was down 11 per cent according to Gartner, and 12 per cent according to IDC, on the same period in 2015.

IBM and Lenovo both saw revenue drops as well, according to both analysts, with Dell the only one of the major vendors to see a slight increase.

"Other than Dell, which remained relatively flat, all top worldwide vendors experienced global revenue declines year over year," said Lloyd Cohen, research director of computing platforms at IDC.

"Just outside the top five, Huawei, ranked number six, grew 73.6 per cent year over year. On a positive note for the overall market, average system values increased nine per cent."