Server market enjoys strong Q3

Enterprises refreshing aging hardware and on-going demand from cloud service providers helped keep the server market in a healthy position in the third quarter.

An analysis of the worldwide server market from IDC showed year-on-year growth of 37.7% with shipments up by 18.3% in Q3, producing the highest ever total revenue, up by 40.2% to $20bn, in a single quarter.

Dell sat in the top position in terms of market share with HPE and Inspur coming in second and third. Lenovo was fourth but enjoyed 67% growth in the third quarter.

"The worldwide server market once again generated strong revenue and unit shipment growth due to an on-going enterprise refresh cycle and continued demand from cloud service providers," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, infrastructure platforms and technologies at IDC.

"Enterprise infrastructure requirements from resource intensive next-generation applications support increasingly rich configurations, ensuring average selling prices (ASPs) remain elevated against the year-ago quarter. At the same time, hyperscalers continue to upgrade and expand their datacenter capabilities," he added.

There has been plenty of focus on servers over the second half of the year with AMD indicating it is going for the upgrade opportunity via the channel and vendors like Dell and Lenovo making sure that their channel is pitching the technology. The growth of edge computing has also helped those selling hardware into retail and branch office environments.

In her look ahead to next year, Miriam Murphy, senior vice president EMEA, Advanced & Specialist Solutions at Tech Data, said that the trends of this year would continue into 2019.

"As the number of IoT rollouts increases month-on-month, so too does the need to process data close to the endpoint instead of on a centralised cloud server. That, of course, is why the number of businesses implementing edge computing has soared in the last year," she said.

"Consequently, in 2019, businesses can expect to see edge-focused infrastructure empowered further still, through the use of AI, greater storage and processing power, and, most significantly, a symbiotic relationship with cloud computing that will mean businesses no longer need to create an entirely new infrastructure to implement edge computing," she added.