- With a corporate upgrade cycle and Web/cloud demand boosting sales, IDC estimates global server revenue rose 4.8% Y/Y in Q3 to $12.7B, an improvement from Q2's 2.5% growth and Q1's 2.2% decline. Gartner is more conservative, estimating revenue only rose 1.7%.
- "IDC has seen increasing market influence from Greater China, hyperscale datacenters, ODMs and native Chinese OEMs, all of which grew sharply in the third quarter," says VP Matt Eastwood. Like others, IDC expects Intel's recent Grantley Xeon CPU launch, together with the pending end of Windows Server 2003 support, to keep demand healthy.
- Thanks to weak demand for its high-end, Itanium-based, Integrity servers, market leader H-P's (NYSE:HPQ) share fell 140 bps Y/Y to 26.5%, after having risen 40 bps in Q2. H-P just rolled out Integrity servers running (x86-based) Intel Xeon CPUs in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
- #2 IBM's share fell 500 bps to 18.2%, thanks to both high-end (mainframe/Power) and x86 weakness. The sale of IBM's x86 server unit to Lenovo closed early in Q4. #3 Dell's share rose 80 bps to 17.8%.
- Cisco (CSCO) passed Oracle (ORCL) to take the #4 slot: Cisco's share rose 130 bps to 6.2% on the back of 31% revenue growth, while Oracle's was flat at 4.1% (3.4% revenue growth). Today, Cisco and IBM announced a converged hardware solution that pairs the former's UCS servers with the latter's Storwize storage arrays.
- As expected, white-label servers sold to Internet giants (called ODM Direct by IDC) continued gaining ground: Their share rose 250 bps to 8.9%. Everyone else saw their share collectively rise 210 bps to 18.4%.
- Related tickers: SMCI, MLNX, QLGC, ELX