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Factory revenue in the worldwide server market fell 3.7 percent year over year to $12.1 billion in the third quarter of 2013 (3Q13), representing the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline, according to IT research firm IDC.
Technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) regained the top position in the worldwide server market with 28.1 percent factory revenue share in the third quarter of 2013.
The company experienced a 1.5 percent year-over-year increase in factory revenue and gained 1.5 points of revenue share on improved demand for x86-based ProLiant servers in the quarter, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.
IBM servers represented the second-highest share of the market, with 23.4 percent factory revenue share following a 19.4 percent year-over-year decline in factory revenue, based largely on soft demand for System x and Power Systems.
“Worldwide server revenue declined in all major geographic regions including Americas, EMEA, and Asia/Pacific in the third quarter,” Matt Eastwood, Group vice president and general manager, enterprise platforms at IDC, said in a statement. “The market was impacted by a steady transition from second platform to third platform workload demand coupled with particularly weak sales of Unix servers, which served to further dampen the market.”
As Eastwood noted, the midrange and high-end segments were impacted by difficult year-over-year compares and continued weakness in Unix demand while volume demand was helped by solid x86 server demand.
Unix servers experienced a revenue decline of 31.3 percent year over year to $1.3 billion, representing 11.1 percent of quarterly server revenue for the quarter–the lowest quarterly Unix server revenue ever reported by IDC.
On a year-over-year basis, volume systems experienced 3.5 percent revenue growth. At the same time, demand for midrange and high-end systems experienced year-over-year revenue declines of 17.8 percent and 22.5 percent in 3Q13.
“Second platform workloads continue to represent a healthy consolidation opportunity across the market, driving solid demand for integrated systems,” Eastwood continued. “At the same time, third platform applications are shifting more and more server demand into cloud service provider data centers, which is opening up new market opportunity for both ODMs and Chinese OEMs.”
In third place was Dell, which saw factory revenue decrease 6 percent compared to the third quarter of 2012 losing 0.4 points of factory revenue share. Cisco and Oracle ended the quarter in a statistical tie for the fourth place in the market with 5 percent and 4.1 percent factory revenue share.
“Blades continue to gain adoption with customers, as they are the foundation for many vendors’ integrated systems,” Jed Scaramella, IDC research director for servers, said in a statement. “Integrated systems combine server, storage, and networking to enable IT organizations to simplify their IT environments and accelerate time to deploy new IT services. The journey to convergence and integrated systems begins with a bladed ecosystem.”