The server market is one of vital part of the enterprise IT market. In the quarter it fell very slightly (-0.1%) to reach $18.1b. In the year to the end of September it fared better – growing by 1.6% to $74b. You’ll want to know more about the changes in vendor shares and the evolution of operating systems and virtualisation.
The Figure shows market shares for vendors and operating systems. I’ve also added a market share for virtualised servers by type.
Server market shares ($US billion) – year to end September 2014 and 2015
| <Q314 | Share % | <Q315 | Share % | Growth % | |
| HP | $13,449 | 18.4% | $14,150 | 19.1% | 5.2% |
| Dell | $10,142 | 13.9% | $11,093 | 15.0% | 9.4% |
| IBM | $7,488 | 10.3% | $5,300 | 7.1% | -29.2% |
| Lenovo | $820 | 1.1% | $3,182 | 4.3% | 287.9% |
| Cisco | $2,701 | 3.7% | $2,760 | 3.7% | 2.2% |
| Huawei | $1,295 | 1.8% | $2,218 | 3.0% | 71.2% |
| Oracle | $2,030 | 2.8% | $2,025 | 2.7% | -0.3% |
| NEC | $2,274 | 3.1% | $1,840 | 2.5% | -19.1% |
| Supermicro | $852 | 1.2% | $1,312 | 1.8% | 54.0% |
| Other | $31,939 | 43.8% | $30,260 | 40.8% | -5.3% |
| Total | $72,989 | 100.0% | $74,140 | 100.0% | 1.6% |
HP is the clear market leader with Dell as its closest rival now IBM has stepped out of the x86 market. At 19.2% HP’s share is however less than EMC (soon to be Dell) in the storage market and Cisco’s in the enterprise network market. It will no doubt be planning to build its share higher now HP Enterprise has split from HP Inc. Lenovo’s massive growth in the year was based on its acquisition of IBM System x, while both Huawei and Supermicro have been out-performing the other players.
Microsoft Windows accounted for 72.2% of the value of all servers – a slight increase on the previous year. Linux grew fastest, although at 11.3% it lags very significantly behind. Unix has declined to just 5.8%, while IBM’s OS/390 held a 3.1% share.
In revenue terms virtualised servers (those running hypervisors) were 39.8% of the total in the year. Of the various types of server virtualisation VMware was the leader, holding a 47.8% share. It was followed by Microsoft’s Hyper-V (10.4%), while KVM – a standard feature of all Linux systems – was close behind with a 9.8% share. Xen was fourth with a 5.0% share, but is far from being eclipsed by KVM due to its large user base.
In total thee were 22.5m servers shipped in the year, with the installed base reaching 71.8m. The Figure compares the installed base of physical-only and virtualised servers, which were split 75:25 of the total installed base. However virtual machines running on virtualised servers out-numbered physical servers 80:20 in the year. The Figure shows the evolution of the server installed base, detailing physical-only and virtual servers and a derived number for virtual machines. It demonstrates the degree to which virtualisation now dominates the server market. Based on the wide acceptance of Windows and VMware virtualisation it now forms a strong basis for the development of a ‘software defined’ enterprise IT market.
As always I only show a small portion of ITCandor’s server research here. as always I can supply greater detail at a country or regional level.