Worldwide server shipments grew 13 percent in the first quarter and Dell Inc. held onto its position as the number-two server maker in the world, according to new numbers.
Dell shipped more than 507,000 servers in the first quarter, up 9.3 percent from the previous year, according to tech researcher Gartner. Its market share dipped, though, from 19.7 to 19 percent in that same period, putting it just behind Hewlett-Packard, which shipped more than 534,000 servers for 20 percent market share.
“We’ve had solid momentum in our server business for several quarters and it continued in (the first quarter),” said Dell spokesman David Frink. “The growth is a reflection of Dell extending our server portfolio by integrating storage to provide customers more richly configured solutions and a better return on their technology investment.”
Round Rock-based Dell Inc. is the largest private employer in Central Texas, with about 14,000 local employees. All of the top five vendors experienced shipment increases in the first quarter of 2015, with Lenovo producing the largest growth rate of 239 percent.
The growth was driven by strong demand from the so-called hyperscale area in the U.S. Hyperscale is a term used to describe distributed systems that use thousands of servers to power cloud and big data infrastructures, according to Gartner
“The first quarter of 2015 was a particularly strong start to the year, with the strongest shipment growth since the third quarter of 2010, when the market was recovering from the downturn. It was also the second-largest-volume quarter ever,” said Adrian O’Connell, research director at Gartner. “The market was driven by particularly strong demand from the hyperscale area, which benefited North America, in particular.”
As for server revenue, Dell made nearly $2.3 billion for the quarter, according to Gartner, up 14.4 percent from a year ago. All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2015 except IBM. Lenovo experienced the largest increase in the first quarter of 2015 with 658.2 percent growth, according to Gartner.
In the first quarter, the regions with the highest growth rates in terms of unit shipments were North America (22.9 percent), the Middle East and Africa (20.8 percent), and Asia/Pacific (13.6 percent). “The strength in North America was strong enough to offset declines in Latin America and Japan,” O’Connell said.