Global server revenue sees 'historic' hike of almost 40 per cent in Q1

IDC analysts say the server market has had a robust performance this year, driven by a market-wide enterprise refresh cycle

Vendor revenue in the worldwide server market increased by 38.6 per cent year on year to $18.8bn during the first quarter of 2018, generating more revenue than any other first quarter on record.

Global server shipments also increased 20.7 per cent to 2.7 million units.

According to IDC analysts, the double-digit hike was driven by "a market-wide enterprise refresh cycle, strong demand from cloud service providers, increased use of servers as the core building blocks for software-defined infrastructure, broad demand for newer CPUs such as Intel's Purely platform, and growing deployments of next generation workloads".

IDC also noted that average selling prices (ASPs) increased during the quarter, thanks to richer configurations and increased component costs, which would have also contributed to revenue growth.

Breaking the market down, high-end systems grew 20.1 per cent to $1.2bn, midrange server revenue grew 34 per cent to $1.bn, and volume server revenue increased by 40.9 per cent to $15.9bn.

IDC's senior research analyst Sanjay Medvitz explained:

"Hyperscale growth continued to drive server volume demand in the first quarter," he said.

"While various OEMs are finding success in this space, ODMs remain the primary beneficiary from the quickly growing hyperscale server demand, now accounting for roughly a quarter of overall server market revenue and shipments."

In terms of market share, Dell Inc. and HPE/New H3C Group were the top two vendors, with 19.1 and 18.6 per cent of the market respectively in 1Q18.

Dell also led as the fastest growing server vendor among the top five companies, growing revenue 50.6 per cent year on year to $3.6bn based on a strong performance in all major geographic regions.