WASHINGTON: Worldwide server shipments in the third quarter grew 9.2% year-over-year, while vendor revenue increased 7.5%, according to Gartner. “The third quarter of 2015 produced growth on a global level with mixed results by region,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice VP at Gartner. “All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue, except for Eastern Europe, Japan and Latin America. Currency exchange rates are one of the main reasons for the disparity in regional server market performance.”
Asia Pacific grew the most in shipments, with a 24% increase. The region also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 25%. HP continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue. The company posted just over $3.7 billion in server vendor revenue for a total market share of 27%.
All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases, except for IBM with a decline of 43%. IBM’s decline is due primarily to its sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo. Beyond that, IBM’s server revenue fell 3% for the RISC segment, but grew 15% for mainframes to post a 5% total growth for the server businesses that it retained.
In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader a shipment increase of 8%. HP’s worldwide server shipment market share was 22%, virtually the same share as in the third quarter of 2014.
All of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide produced shipment increases, with Lenovo recording the largest growth of 183%. “x86 servers managed to produce an increase with growth of 9% in shipments and 10% in revenue year-over-year,” said Hewitt. “RISC/Itanium Unix server revenue declined 12% in the third quarter, while shipments grew 1%. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 4% in terms of revenue.”
