In the third quarter of 2014, worldwide server shipments grew 1 per cent year-over-year, while revenue moved upward 1.7 per cent from the third quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, Inc.
"The third quarter of 2014 produced modest growth on a global level, highlighting positive but constrained demand," said Errol Rasit, research director at Gartner. "Only North America and Asia Pacific exhibited shipments growth, largely driven by demand from hyperscale organisations located there. These results support the continued bifurcation of enterprise and consumer services server demand."
The platform mix by region and geographic variations in economic conditions are the main reasons for these results. Asia/Pacific posted the highest shipments growth at 8.7 per cent and 7.5 per cent increase in revenue, while North America posted a more modest 0.7 per cent in shipments and 2.6 per cent increase in revenue. Western Europe saw a 2 per cent shipments decrease, but a growth of 3.8 per cent in revenue. Eastern Europe fell 10.8 per cent in shipments and 6.3 per cent in vendor revenue, and the Middle East and Africa posted a 5.2 per cent shipments decrease and 6.7 per cent decrease in revenue. Japan declined 6.7 per cent in shipments and 10.6 per cent in vendor revenue, and Latin America dropped 6.3 per cent in shipments and 4.1 per cent in vendor revenue for the quarter.
"x86 servers managed to grow 1.2 per cent in units and 7.4 per cent in revenue in the third quarter of 2014," said Mr Rasit. "RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 17.1 per cent globally for the period and declined 8.0 per cent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year."
Despite a decline of 0.9 per cent, HP was the worldwide server market leader based on revenue in the third quarter of 2014 (see Table 1). The company posted nearly $3.4 billion in server revenue to account for 26.9 per cent of worldwide server revenue. Cisco experienced the highest growth in the third quarter with 30.8 per cent.
In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2014 (see Table 2) despite a year-over-year shipment decline of 14.9 per cent for the quarter. Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, all produced shipment increases except for HP and IBM.
Additional information is available to subscribers of the Gartner Servers Quarterly Statistics Worldwide programme. This programme provides worldwide market size and share data by vendor revenue and unit shipments. Segments include: region, vendor, vendor brand, sub brand, CPU type, CPU group, Max CPU, platform, price band, OSs and distribution channels.
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