World server sales in the first quarter decreased by 4.6%, and Dell became the market leader in quantitative terms, according to the data of the report of the International Data Corporation (IDC).
According to analysts 'estimates, server manufacturers' revenue from server sales in January-March 2017 was $ 11.8 billion compared to $ 12.4 billion a year ago. In physical terms, the market grew by 1.4%, to 2.21 million units. The share of one of the buyers accounted for more than 10% of server shipments, the researchers note, without naming the name of this customer.
The study said that the overall dynamics of the server market growth continues to slow, as many providers of hyper-scalable services are waiting for the second half of 2017, when there will be new processors Intel Skylake. Negative influence on the market is also exerted by weak sales of high-performance systems and rising prices for memory.
According to the IDC report, in the first quarter of 2017 world sales of servers of the initial level (volume server), to which experts refer systems worth up to 25 thousand dollars, decreased by 3.4% year on year, amounting to 9.5 billion dollars.
In the mid-range server segment, manufacturers recorded a 16.5 percent increase in revenues, to $ 1.3 billion, as the update cycle for x86 systems in the corporate sector was completed. As for high-end, high-end enterprise servers, vendor revenues have fallen by 29%, to $ 1 billion. In this segment, analysts predict further regression.
The largest server manufacturer in terms of revenue remained Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), whose share in the first three months of 2017 was 24.2%. The top three included Dell (20.1%) and Cisco (7%). The largest decline in revenues (by almost 35%) occurred in IBM, which resulted in the company slipping from the third to the fourth place in the leading group with a 6.3% market share.
The regress was fixed for all leading vendors, except for Dell, whose server revenue rose 4.7%.
In the first quarter of 2017, Dell released more servers than anyone (465.3 thousand units), which corresponds to 21% of the total market volume. HPE, which was in the lead earlier, completed the quarter in second place with a 20.8%. The top three in terms of shipments of servers was Lenovo (6.6%). The fourth place for Huawei (5.4%), the fifth - for Inspur (4.5%).