Server market growth will soften in 2019 - analyst

Shipment figures will see just two per cent growth in the first six months of 2019, claims market watcher

Growth in the global server market will slow down during the first six months of 2019, claims one analyst firm, which predicts a modest two per cent increase in shipments compared to the same period last year.

IT buyers have been stocking up on servers in order to migrate to the latest processor platforms earlier than expected, claims market watcher DRAMeXchange, which will in turn lead to lower demand going into next year.

"Brands tend to be conservative about new market deployment. In the second half [of 2019], the market may have new demand momentum after new platforms like Gen2 from Intel and Rome from AMD come out," said senior DRAMeXchange analyst Mark Liu.

The slowdown will come after a strong 2018 for server shipments, which the market watcher estimates will post five per cent year-on-year growth to 12.4 million units.

It pegs Dell EMC as the market leader by global shipments, making up 16.7 per cent of total units in 2018, while HPE and Insupr come second and third with 15.1 per cent and 7.8 per cent respectively.

"The growth of the global server market is mainly driven by branded server suppliers in North America, who contribute to more than 30 per cent of the global server shipments. As for the percentage breakdown by types of server, enterprise servers account for the majority of the global shipments while the percentage of servers used for Internet datacentre grows to nearly 35 per cent. The continued growth is because demand from Internet datacentre is less seasonal," said Liu.

The anticipated slowdown in server shipments for the start of 2019 chimes with the less optimistic outlooks given by channel CEOs and industry figures from Canalys, Softcat, Cancom, World Wide Technology and Computacenter, all of which have warned that the infrastructure market could soften going into next year.