Server shipments recorded their strongest growth in more than four years in the first quarter of 2015, driven by cloud growth, with Asia Pacific among the front runners for growth. Gartner says worldwide server shipments grew 13% year on year, while revenue was up 17.9%.
Asia Pacific recorded 13.6% growth in unit shipments, behind North America’s 22.9% and the Middle East and Africa on 20.8%, but ahead of EMEA on 1% and Latin America and Japan, which both recorded declines.
Adrian O’Connell, Gartner research director, says the first quarter of 2015 was the strongest shipment growth since the third quarter of 2010, when the market was recovering from the downturn. Q1 2015 was also the second-largest volume quarter ever, he adds. “The market was driven by particularly strong demand from the hyperscale area, which benefited North America, in particular,” O’Connell says.
“This comes at a time when other regions are struggling, due to price pressure driven by the appreciation of the US dollar.”O’Connell says x86 server shipments were up 13.2% on the first quarter of 2014, with revenue up 14.5%. Risc/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 2.9%, with revenue down 3.1%. “The ‘other’ category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 95.1% in terms of revenue,” O’Connell says.
HP remained number one for both estimated server revenue, with a 23.8% market share, and server shipments, with 20% market share. However, even though its revenue up, HP wasn’t keeping pace with its competitors, with revenue dropping from 25.5% market share to 23.8%. HP also recorded a drop of 2.6 percentage points in share from the same quarter in 2014 when it came to shipments.
It was Lenovo who was a big winner, with the vendor experiencing the largest increase in the first quarter of 2015 for both server revenue – up a whopping 658.2% to claim 7.2% market share and gain fourth spot – and server shipments, up 239.2%.
On the flip side, IBM dropped 15.9% in revenue – the only vendor in the top five of HP, Dell, IBM, Lenovo and Cisco, to not record a revenue increase for the quarter. Both Lenovo and IBM’s figures were impacted by Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business. HP, Dell, Lenovo, Huawei and Inspur Electronics took the top five slots in server shipments.
