Server market fall double digits as service providers slam wallets shut

Hyperscale service providers playing wait-and-see game on Intel Skylake processors, says IDC

Western Europe has seen sharp declines in server sales during the first quarter of the year, according to IDC, as service providers have purposefully held off deployments until the second half of the year.

The global market saw revenues decline by 4.6 per cent year over year to $11.8bn during the first quarter of the year, the market watcher claims. Western European sales saw some of the world's steepest revenue declines, falling 14.3 per cent year over year, a percentage exceeded only by Latin America and the Middle East at 14.6 per cent and 14.8 per cent respectively.

Central and eastern European, meanwhile, posted the highest regional year-over-year growth at 7.2 per cent, while the US declined by 2.3 per cent.

IDC claims that the global decline was in part down to hyperscale service providers holding off on server deployments until the second half of this year in preparation for the release of Intel's new Skylake processors.

The market watcher also claims that one customer, which was unnamed, accounted for more than 10 per cent of all servers shipped in Q1.

"The server market continues to struggle to find growth," said Kuba Stolarski, research director of computing platforms at IDC.

"As the market prepares for the switch to Intel's Skylake this year, we may be witnessing a shift in how workloads are deployed in the future, and what architectural choices will be made around modularity, operating environments, software, and cloud services. As indicated by this quarter's results, one large server customer appears to be betting on a major transition to cloud services, as it alone accounted for approximately a quarter of a million servers deployed in the first quarter."

Dell EMC and HPE retain their positions and market leaders both in terms of sales for the quarter and total shipments. HPE, however, saw a 15.8 per cent year-over-year worldwide server sales declines in Q1 to $2.86bn, while Dell EMC's sales grew by 4.7 per cent annually to $2.37bn.

Behind the two leades, IBM, Cisco and Lenovo, all suffered sales declines on a year-over-year basis.

The worldwide volume server market and the high-end market both saw declines, with the latter seeing sales fall by 29 per cent annually to $1bn. The mid-market bucked the trend posting 16.5 per cent growth to $1.3bn.