In the second quarter of 2015, worldwide server shipments grew 8.0 percent year over year, while revenue increased 7.2 percent from the second quarter of 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).
“The second quarter year-over-year growth for 2015 slowed compared with the annual growth of the first quarter of the year,” says Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at the research group. “Currency exchange rate changes have started to show their impact by reducing relative spending power in regions like Western Europe. It is likely that in anticipation of further currency rate shifts that some organizations utilized their budgets earlier in the year rather than waiting until the third or fourth quarters when their purchasing power may be further reduced by these relative currency changes.
x86 server shipments increased 8.3 percent in the second quarter of 2015 and revenue grew 9 percent. RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 18.7 percent globally for the period, while RISC/Itanium revenue declined 9.7 percent compared with the same quarter last year. The “other” CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 7.8 percent.
From the regional standpoint, North America grew the most significantly in shipments with a 14.8 percent increase. The region also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 14.7 percent for the period.
HP maintained its No. 1 ranking in the worldwide server market based on revenue with a 25.2 percent market share. Lenovo experienced the largest increase in the second quarter of 2015 with 526.5 percent growth in revenue. All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the second quarter of 2015 except IBM.
In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the second quarter of 2015 with a year-over-year shipment increase of 2.5 percent. HP’s worldwide server shipment share was 21.7 percent, representing a 1.2 percent drop in share from the same quarter in 2014.