Report: Server Revenue & Shipments Increased Worldwide in 4th Qtr 2015

According to Gartner, overall 2015 server shipments worldwide increased by 9.9 percent alongside an increase of 10.1 percent in server revenues.

The latest report from Gartner, focused on the fourth quarter of 2015, shows just one company taking a hit in their year over year on both revenue and server shipments.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the newly formed company from the split of HP into separate enterprise and consumer companies, showed a 2.2 percent drop in server revenues compared to the same period in the previous year. Gartner also shows a 2.6 percent drop in server shipments between the same two periods.

The reason for the drops for HPE, according to Gartner, include:

The primary decline in HPE's server shipments can be attributed to a global weakness in Windows-based x86 servers, while the decline in revenue was driven mostly by a drop in RISC/Itanium Unix server sales for the period.

The only other company to see a decrease in the fourth quarter was Dell with just a .3 percent drop in server hardware shipments.

Among the other companies in the report, Cisco experienced a 20.2 percent growth in revenue, although they do not even show up in the corresponding top five list in shipment numbers.  

Inspur Electronics and Huawei saw the biggest increases on global shipments of server hardware with 53.3 and 27 percent respectively.

Regionally Asia/Pacific led in server shipments with 20.1 percent, followed by North America (8.5 percent) and Western Europe (4.3 percent).

Gartner's report indicates that Facebook, Microsoft and Google are having a significant impact on server shipments:

"The real growth driver for the quarter in terms of absolute value was the Other Vendors category," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "This collection of unspecified vendors that includes original design manufacturers (ODMs), like Quanta and Wistron, contributed over $750 million in revenue and over 170,000 server unit shipments for the period. This demonstrates that the growth of hyperscale data centers, like those of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, continues to be the leading contributor to physical server increases globally."

Remember - what we know as being in the cloud is actually data sitting on a server somewhere in the world - so hardware remains a critical link in the ecosystem.

But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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