HP Leads As Server Shipments Grow

The server market seems to be rude health after analyst house Gartner reported shipments grew by eight percent in the second quarter of 2015.

Hewlett-Packard, which is to split itself into two businesses later this year, remains top dog with a worldwide server shipment share of 21.7 percent.

Robust Growth

The demand for server kit saw revenue increase by 7.2 percent from the second quarter of 2014. This is good news for server makers after a stagnant couple of years following the economic downturn. And perhaps surprisingly, the Gartner figures also revealed that mainframe sales were also robust, with a 7.8 percent rise in shipments.

“The second quarter year-over-year growth for 2015 slowed compared with the annual growth of the first quarter of the year,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research VP at Gartner.

“Currency exchange rate changes have started to show their impact by reducing relative spending power in regions like Western Europe,” said Hewitt. “It is likely that in anticipation of further currency rate shifts that some organisations utilised their budgets earlier in the year rather than waiting until the third or fourth quarters when their purchasing power may be further reduced by these relative currency changes.

“x86 server shipments increased 8.3 percent in the second quarter of 2015 and revenue grew 9 percent,” added Hewitt. “RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 18.7 percent globally for the period, while RISC/Itanium revenue declined 9.7 percent compared with the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 7.8 percent.”

Server Players

HP maintained its number one ranking for the worldwide server market based on revenue with a 25.2 percent market share. Next up was Dell (17.4 percent), IBM (13.7 percent), Lenovo (7 percent) and Cisco (6.4 percent).

Lenovo however put some pressure as it experienced the largest increase in the second quarter of 2015 with 526.5 percent growth in revenue. All of the top five global vendors experienced revenue increases for the second quarter of 2015 except IBM which of course sold its x86 server business to Lenovo last year.

Earlier this year, HP teamed up with Foxconn to build open, low-cost servers for cloud environments to enable the tech giant to push back at the encroachment of white-box makers in the data centre.

The low-cost servers are available under the Cloudline name and offer alternatives to the company’s proprietary line of ProLiant systems. They also embrace standards developed within the Open Compute Project (OCP), an effort started in 2011 by Facebook to develop ways to create more power-efficient, cost-effective data center hardware.

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