The worldwide server market continued to grow through 2018 as worldwide server revenue increased 17.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2018, said a report by research firm Gartner. According to the agency, shipments grew 8.5 per cent year over year. In the full year 2018, worldwide server shipments grew 13.1 per cent and server revenue increased 30.1 per cent compared with full-year 2017.

“Hyperscale and service providers continued to increase their investments in their data centers to meet customers’ rising service demand, as well as enterprises’ services purchases from cloud providers,” said Kiyomi Yamada, senior principal analyst at Gartner. “DRAM prices started to come down, increasing demand for memory-rich configurations to support emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics kept buoying server prices,” added the report.

As per Gartner, Dell EMC secured the top spot in the worldwide server market based on revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018. The company ended the year with 20.2 per cent market share, followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with 17.7 per cent of the market. Huawei experienced the strongest growth in the quarter, growing 45.9 per cent. In server shipments, Dell EMC maintained the topslot in the fourth quarter of 2018 with 16.7 per cent market share. HPE secured the second spot with 12.2 per cent.

Both Dell EMC and HPE experienced declines in server shipments, while Inspur Electronics experienced the strongest growth with a 24.6 per cent increase in shipments in the fourth quarter of 2018.In terms of regional results in 2018, Asia/Pacific and North America posted strong growth in revenue with 38.3 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively.

In terms of shipments, Asia/Pacific grew 17.6 per cent and North America grew 15.9 per cent year over year. The EMEA regions grew 3.1 per cent in shipments and 20.4 per cent in revenue. Latin America revenue grew 20.9 per cent, but declined 4.4 per cent in shipments. 

Asia-Pacific leads
The APAC region was the fastest growing in the world in 2018 in terms of both revenue and shipments. Japan, meanwhile, recorded the slowest growth