Asia Saving the Global Server Market : Gartner

Last week, Gartner published its report on Server markets. The Global spendings have evidently dipped in 2013. In simple terms, OEMs have collectively shipped more servers but at a lesser price. Even that has not affected the global market which is still almost flat. They either have to tap the cheaper growing markets or look at consolidating their resources on a whole. It is now a saturated market and this report does suggest that Brands have made their offerings cheaper.

The saving grace in the downturn... Asia and Japan markets which recorded growth of 16.3% and 7.5% respectively. All regions declined in vendor revenue except Asia/Pacific, which grew by 0.6 percent year over year

IBM, which is selling its x86 server unit to Lenovo, has seen large declines in both server revenue and shipments, the analyst firm says. This has been one of the reasons for the company to get rid of this line of business.

Here are the Imp Pointers from Gartner's report:

• Worldwide server shipments grew 3.2 percent year over year, while revenue declined 6.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012
• 2013 demonstrated growth in shipments with an increase of 2.1 percent, but revenue declined 4.5 percent with varying geographic results
• HP led the worldwide server market in revenue terms in the fourth quarter of 2013
• HP was the 2013 leader in x86 blade server shipments with 40.3 percent market share; Cisco was in second place with 15.9 percent of the market
• "In terms of hardware platform types, mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix platform market performance kept overall revenue growth in check," Mr. Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner
• Regions with the highest growth rates in terms of unit shipments were Asia/Pacific (16.3 percent), Japan (7.5 percent) and North America (relatively flat at 0.01 percent)

TABLE 1: Global Server Revenue

HP led the worldwide server market in revenue terms in the fourth quarter of 2013 with $3.8 billion in revenue for Q4 and a total share of 28.1 percent worldwide. This was up 6.0 percent compared with the same quarter in 2012. Of the top five global vendors, only HP and Cisco showed growth for the quarter. IBM had the largest decline with a decrease of 28.9 percent. Cisco got the largest jump in server revenues, growing 34.5 percent because of its Unified Computing System integrated solution. Along with IBM, Dell and Oracle also saw revenues fall.

TABLE 2: Global Server Shipments

Huawei very clearly is trying to expand its enterprise reach into the United States and other markets. Their growth for the quarter is a whopping 187.9 percent. However, their number of shipped units stand at 91,433 which is dwarfed by HP's 721,032. 

Even for Server shipments, HP leads the worldwide table for 4Q13 with a year-over-year shipment increase of 8.7 percent. Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, all but Dell and IBM had shipment increases for the period. Huawei exhibited the strongest year-over-year increase with growth of 187.9 percent.

Gartner predicts that there will be modest growth in the server market in 2014.

Source: Gartner

- @vaistorm