In the third quarter of 2014, worldwide server shipments grew 1 percent year-over-year, while revenue moved upward 1.7 percent from the third quarter of 2013, according to research firm Gartner.
“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 organizations 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 shipment growth at 8.7 percent and 7.5 percent increase in revenue, while North America posted a more modest 0.7 percent in shipments and 2.6 percent increase in revenue.
“x86 servers managed to grow 1.2 percent in units and 7.4 percent in revenue in the third quarter of 2014,” said Rasit. “RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 17.1 percent globally for the period and declined 8.0 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year.”
Despite a decline of 0.9 percent, HP was the worldwide server market leader based on revenue in the third quarter of 2014. The company posted nearly $3.4 billion in server revenue to account for 26.9 percent of worldwide server revenue. Cisco experienced the highest growth in the third quarter with 30.8 percent.
