Dell EMC put some distance between itself and runner-up Hewlett-Packard Enterprise as the market leader in both server revenue and server units shipped globally in Q2 2018, according to IDC research released Sept. 5.
For the overall industry, worldwide server vendor revenues increased 43.7 percent year over year to $22.5 billion during the quarter. Worldwide server shipments increased 20.5 percent year over year to 2.9 million units for the same Q2.
Here are details of the report, along with related Dell EMC background:
- Dell EMC claimed 18.8 percent of all server revenues for Q2 (totaling $4.25 billion). This outperformed No. 2 HPE (16.6 percent revenue share; $3.74 billion in revenue). IDC noted that Dell EMC grew faster than the market with 52.9 percent year over year revenue growth, while HPE/H3C saw 11.7 percent year-over-year revenue growth. For x86 revenue only, Dell EMC share was 20.8 percent; HPE/H3C share was 17.5 percent.
- Dell EMC also led with 19.5 percent of all server units shipped globally for Q2, shipping 132,182 more x86 server units than HPE/H3C, which experienced a quarterly loss of -12.4 percent year over year, while Dell grew 16.6 percent in year-over-year total server shipments. For x86 units only, Dell EMC share was 19.7 percent; HPE/H3C share was 15.2 percent.
- IBM and Lenovo came in third and fourth, respectively, with IBM earning $1.6 billion (7.3 percent marketshare) and Lenovo $1.55 billion (6.9 percent).
- Inspur, Cisco Systems and Huawei were next, each earning about $1 billion in the quarter and taking a little less than 5 percent marketshare each.
What does this substantial server growth mean? IDC analysts said:
- Overall, this demonstrates the continued, massive desire for servers and the imperative nature of on-premises IT.
- Dell EMC outpaced server competitors because buyers are seeing value in Dell EMC’s differentiated 14th generation of PowerEdge servers, designed for IoT use cases at the edge to PowerEdge R940xa and R840 in the data center; they first shipped in Q2 designed as powerhouses for artificial intelligence efforts.
- In addition to traditional computing leadership, IDC noted that Dell EMC continues to be No. 1 in global HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) system sales with a 29.6 percent share (up from 21.6 percent in 1Q17), and an impressive growth rate of 142.7 percent year over year–a rate nearly twice the overall industry growth of 76.3 percent (IDC, 1Q18).
Dell EMC says it is continuing to innovate by delivering industry-available composability now while leading the way in making full composability a reality for customers. HPE also offers composable infrastructure, as does newcomer Liqid and several other vendors.
On Aug. 21, Dell EMC announced the launch of Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, the industry’s newest high-performance, modular infrastructure supporting a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads. PowerEdge MX, shipping globally Sept. 12, is also the industry’s first modular infrastructure uniquely designed without a midplane to adapt to future technologies and server disagregation with Dell EMC kinetic infrastructure.