Servers (whether deployed by enterprise customers or cloud service providers) provide the backbone of the ITC industry and applications we use socially and for business, financial and citizen applications. They are vital to helping us survive the forced isolation introduced to try to halt the spread of the current pandemic. In this post I look at annual trends in spending, shipments and their installed base to the end of 2019.
My Figure above shows the development of revenues from thee seven leading server suppliers since 2005. It shows how IBM’s deliberate withdrawal from the x86 in 2013 and Dell EMC’s rise has changed the make-ip of the market; as well as how new-comers Cisco, Huawei and Lenovo have risen, replacing most of the big vendors from previous decades.
At a regional level the Americas continues as the leading region, while the rise of business in Asia Pacific (especially that of China) has led to it overtaking EMEA as the second largest region. Server spending declined in 2019 by 9% to $75.6b, while shipments dropped by 17% to 21.3m – a sign of the degree to which cloud data centres with self-built systems are slowly taking up some of the money spent on servers by enterprise customers, as well as a natural fall-back from the levels in 2018 when a number of technical improvements in storage and processing created strong growth. 
Since VMware started shipping its hypervisors to x86 servers in 2002 the proportion of virtualized servers (those able to host multiple operating system versions) has risen as a proportion of server shipments. In 2019 they accounted for 42% of all servers shipped (up from 12% in 2005), while the number of virtual machines they host has risen from 6m to 36m. In recent years there has also been a sharp rise in the number of container applications and containers running on servers, although the majority are run frrom self-built cloud supplier systems.
My Figure above shows the share of the $76b server spending in 2019 by supplier, operating system and virtualization status. It shows the extent to which Dell EMC and HPE now lead the market, the massive 72.1% share that Microsoft Windows has of server operating systems and the fact that physical-only servers (those not running hypervisors) still represented 55.6% of spending.
By the end of 2019 there were 74.7m servers installed and in use in the world – slightly down on 2018. However (as my Figure shows for the period of the Credit Crunch in 2008 to 2009) server lifecycles can be extended in difficult times. Thanks to the work of maintainers, whether working for server suppliers or third parties, many users will no doubt continue to use older machines instead of replacing them in 2020.