Thursday, February 27, 2014

Revenue decline by 4.5 percent in global Server Market, says Gartner

 In the fourth quarter of 2013, worldwide server shipments grew 3.2 percent year over year, while revenue declined 6.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. In all of 2013, worldwide server shipments grew 2.1 percent, and server revenue declined 4.5 percent.

"2013 presented some pronounced differences in various server market segments," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "We've seen ongoing growth in Web-scale IT deployments, while the enterprise remained relatively constrained."

"In terms of hardware platform types, mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix platform market performance kept overall revenue growth in check," Mr. Hewitt said.

In the fourth quarter of 2013, the 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). All regions declined in vendor revenue except Asia/Pacific, which grew by 0.6 percent year over year.

HP led the worldwide server market in revenue terms in the fourth quarter of 2013 (see Table 1). The company ended the year with $3.8 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, for 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.