Global server market revenue fell in the second quarter, with three of the top five vendors experiencing sales drops amid the continuing decline of the high-end segment, according to International Data Corp.
The research firm said in its latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker that vendor revenue declined 0.4% year over year to $13.4 billion in the second quarter. High-end systems experienced a decline of 31.4% to $1.6 billion.
“Overall server market growth has recently slowed in part due to a pause in hyperscale data-center expansion and is feeling the continued drag from high-end server sale declines,” IDC said.
But worldwide server shipments increased 2.6% to 2.4 million units while volume system revenue increased 5.3% and midrange system demand increased 12.7% to $10.6 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively.
“The server market is progressing exactly as expected, with close to flat growth in the second quarter, following a difficult first quarter, but growth in volume servers is still healthy, which is a good sign for the market moving forward,” Kuba Stolarski, research director for computing platforms at IDC, said in a news release.
Among individual vendors, Hewlett Packard Enterprise remained the market leader with a 25.4% share but its revenue fell 0.3% to $3.4 billion and Dell moved into the top spot for shipments, with an 8.9% increase. Dell’s revenue rose 10% to $2.6 billion.
No. 3 IBM’s revenue decreased 34.0% to $1.3 billion as both its Power and System Z mainframes experienced double-digit declines. Lenovo and Cisco tied for 4th place.
For the second half of 2016, IDC’s expects market growth will be spurred by cloud data-center buildouts from key hyperscalers. “Looking out further, the market will be impacted by digital transformation initiatives, including the Internet of Things and cognitive computing, and by a continuing shift towards software-defined infrastructure,” Stolarski predicted.
According to numbers released by Gartner, worldwide server revenue fell 0.8% to $13.5 billion in the second quarter, while shipments, at more than 2.75 million units, increased 2%.