Dell EMC held onto the No. 1 server vendor spot with 17.5 percent revenue share, or $4.09 billion, during the third quarter of 2018, according to IDC’s latest numbers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) once again came in No. 2, with 16.3 percent revenue share ($3.81 billion).
Also during the quarter Dell EMC grew revenue 33.3 percent year over year, while HPE grew revenue 14.8 percent.
Inspur was third, and Lenovo was fourth. IBM, Huawei, and Cisco rounded out the top group, all statistically tied with vendor revenue shares of 5.1 percent, 4.5 percent, and 4.5 percent respectively.
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market increased 37.7 percent year over year to $23.4 billion during the third quarter of 2018. This marks the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth and its highest total revenue in a single quarter ever.
Worldwide Server Shipments
Meanwhile, worldwide server shipments increased 18.3 percent to 3.2 million units. Dell EMC also led this grouping with 17.6 percent of all server units shipped globally during the third quarter, growing 10.5 percent in year over year total shipments. HPE saw a quarterly loss of 9 percent.
The server market figures come as Dell EMC’s parent company, Dell Technologies, prepares to become a publicly traded company again following a shareholder vote earlier this week.
Sebastian Lagana, research manager of Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC, credits the robust growth to an ongoing enterprise refresh cycle and continued strong demand from cloud service providers. “Enterprise infrastructure requirements from resource intensive next-generation applications support increasingly rich configurations, ensuring average selling prices remain elevated against the year-ago quarter,” he said. “At the same time, hyperscalers continue to upgrade and expand their data center capabilities.”
China Is the Fastest Growing Region
On a geographic basis, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) was the fastest growing region with 46.5 percent year-over-year revenue growth. The U.S. grew 43.7 percent in the quarter while Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew 24.5 percent, Canada grew 20 percent, Japan grew 14 percent, and Latin America grew 7.7 percent. China saw its third-quarter vendor revenues grow 67.1 percent year over year.
Demand for x86 servers increased 41 percent to $21.8 billion in revenues. Non-x86 servers grew 3.9 percent year over year to $1.6 billion.
