Server market declines following best-ever quarter

Q3 is second best server quarter by volume ever, following record high in Q2

The global server market has tanked for the second consecutive quarter, according to IDC.

Both revenues and shipments have fallen in Q3, the market watcher claims. Revenues declined 6.7 per cent year on year to $22bn (£16.7bn) while shipments were down by 3.7 per cent to just under 3.1 million units.

Despite the decline, Q3 was still the second best quarter of volume shipments in history, IDC claims.

"In fact, Q3 2019 represented the second biggest quarter for global server unit shipments in more than 16 years, eclipsed only by Q3 18," Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst in infrastructure platforms and technologies at IDC, said.

"While the server market did indeed decline last quarter, next generation workloads and advanced server innovation keep demand for enterprise compute at near historic highs."

Nonetheless, global server sales started trending downwards in Q2, for the first time in more than two years.

In a neck-and-neck draw, Dell and HPE captured 17.2 per cent and 16.8 per cent revenue share, respectively.

The third ranking server vendor was Inspur Power Systems, which took nine per cent.

Lenovo and Cisco rounded off the top five with 5.4 and 4.9 per cent revenue share, respectively.