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Worldwide server shipments increased 8.2 percent year over year, while revenue grew 9.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2014, according to a report from IT research firm Gartner.
The report noted worldwide server shipments grew 9.9 percent, while server revenue increased 10.1 percent in 2015, led by HPE, Dell and IBM.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) led the market with just over a quarter of the market share in the fourth quarter of 2015, with revenues of $3.8 billion. Dell placed second, securing 16 percent market share and taking in $2.5 billion in revenue.
However, HPE was the only company in the top five not to experience revenue growth or an increase in market share, which the report attributed to global weakness in Windows-based x86 servers and a drop in RISC/Itanium Unix server sales for the period.
Overall, worldwide x86 server demand increased in shipments by 9.3 percent and revenue by 10.4 percent for the fourth quarter of 2015. The report noted x86 servers continue to be the predominant platform used for large-scale data center build-outs across the globe.
In addition, the growth of integrated systems, while still relatively small as an overall percentage of the hardware infrastructure market, also provided some growth contribution to the x86 server space for the year.
Back on the vendor side, IBM placed third in server vendor revenue with 13 percent market share and saw revenue growth of 10.3 percent, the second best level of growth in the top five.
Lenovo and Cisco rounded out the top five, securing 7.5 percent and 6.1 percent market share, with the latter scoring a robust 20 percent surge in revenue growth.
In terms of absolute value, the “Other Vendors” category served as the main driver of growth with original design manufacturers (ODMs), like Quanta and Wistron, contributing more than $750 million in revenue and over 170,000 server unit shipments for the period.
In server shipments, Huawei and Inspur Electronics experienced the strongest growth in the fourth quarter of 2015, with shipment growth of 27 percent and 53.3 percent.
Turning to global markets, Gartner found the regions with the highest growth rates in unit shipments were Asia/Pacific (20.1 percent), North America (8.5 percent) and Western Europe (4.3 percent).
The report predicted hyperscale data centers, like those of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, will continue to be the leading contributor to physical server increases globally, with modest growth expected to continue in the server space on the whole, though with some constraint being felt from current economic and currency exchange issues in some regions.