In the first quarter of 2015, worldwide server shipments grew 13 percent year over year, while revenue increased 17.9 percent from the first quarter of 2014, according to Gartner.
“The first quarter of 2015 was a particularly strong start to the year, with the strongest shipment growth since the third quarter of 2010, when the market was recovering from the downturn,” says Adrian O'Connell, research director, Gartner.
“It was also the second-largest-volume quarter ever. The market was driven by particularly strong demand from the hyper-scale area, which benefited North America, in particular.
According to O'Connell, this comes at a time when other regions are struggling, due to price pressure driven by the appreciation of the U.S. dollar.
O'Connell says the strength in North America was strong enough to offset declines in Latin America and Japan while EMEA was barely positive, with one percent volume growth.
"x86 server shipments increased 13.2 percent from the first quarter of 2014, and revenue increased 14.5 percent,” O'Connell adds.
“RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 2.9 percent, while revenue declined 3.1 percent compared with the same quarter last year.
“The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 95.1 percent in terms of revenue.”
HP maintained its No. 1 ranking in the worldwide server market based on revenue with 23.8 percent market share in the first quarter of 2015.
Also, Lenovo experienced the largest increase in the first quarter of 2015 with 658.2 percent growth with all of the top five global vendors seeing revenue increases for the first quarter of 2015 except IBM.
In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the first quarter of 2015, but growth was flat.
O'Connell says HP's worldwide server shipment share was 20.0 percent, representing a drop of 2.6 percentage points in share from the same quarter in 2014.
All of the top five vendors experienced shipment increases in the first quarter of 2015, with Lenovo producing the largest growth rate of 239.2 percent.
In the first quarter of 2015, the regions with the highest growth rates in terms of unit shipments were North America (22.9 percent), the Middle East and Africa (20.8 percent), and Asia/Pacific (13.6 percent).
