Beancounters at IDC have added up some numbers and divided them by their shoe size and worked out that the worldwide server market jumped 26.4 percent year over year to $20.7 billion during the fourth quarter of 2017.
Sanjay Medvitz, senior research analyst at IDC for servers and storage, wrote in the report that the top five market leaders in the market all saw double-digit revenue growth in the quarter compared with the same quarter in 2016.
“Hyper-scalers remained a central driver of volume demand in the fourth quarter with leaders such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google continuing their data center expansions and updates”, he said
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the market leader with a share of 18.4 percent after shipping 480,000 units. It made $3.8 billion in sales, up 10 percent year over year. HPE saw its market share dip from 21.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 to 18.4 percent. HPE shipped the second-most number of total server units during the quarter with 480,000. HPE’s share and growth rate includes revenue from the New H3C Group joint venture in China, which began in May 2016.
Dell is the number two with a market share of 17.5 percent and 582,000 units shipped. This was 102,000 more than HPE, but the margins were not so good. Dell generated $3.6 billion in worldwide server sales during the quarter, up 40 percent year over year, compared with $2.58 billion in fourth-quarter 2016. IDC’s Medvitz said Dell is continuing its “robust growth” by capitalising on expanded opportunities from its $67 billion acquisition of EMC in 2016.
IBM is continuing to improve. With a market Share of 13 percent, it shipped 150,000 units. Total sales were $2.7 billion which was up 50 percent year over year. The outfits share increased from 11 percent in fourth quarter 2016 to 13 percent due to the $900,000 spike in server revenue year over year. However, IBM did not rank in IDC’s top six vendor list regarding the number of total server units shipped because it shipped less than 150,000 servers.
