IDC came out with their Q3 2013 worldwide server market revenue report on December 4, 2013 which shows blade server revenues grew 7.7% $2.3 billion. This was a huge turnaround from the -6.2% loss as reported last quarter. Blade server sales accounting for 18.7% of all server revenues reported, nearly 2% higher than last quarter. According to IDC, demand for x86 servers continued to improve in 3Q13, with revenues growing 2.8% in the quarter to $9.5 billion worldwide with unit shipment growth flat at 2.2 million servers.
In the blade server market, HP maintained the number 1 spot in the blade server market in 3Q13 falling 1.2% from last quarter to 43.6%; while Cisco and IBM held the second and third position in the blade market with 20.4% and 18.3% revenue share, respectively.
“Blades continue to gain adoption with customers, as they are the foundation for many vendors’ integrated systems” said Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC. “Integrated systems combine server, storage, and networking to enable IT organizations to simplify their IT environments and accelerate time to deploy new IT services. The journey to convergence and integrated systems begins with a bladed ecosystem.”
In overall worldwide server systems factory revenue, HP reclaimed the top spot with 28.1% market share in Q313. IBM followed in 2nd place with 23.4% and Dell came in third with 16.2% market share. Overall, the worldwide server systems factory revenue fell -3.7% in Q313.
An important note from the Q3 2013 Worldwide Server Market report, in response to evolving market demand within large scale, Web 2.0, and cloud hosting environments, Original Design Manfucturers (ODMs), such as Quanta Computer, Wistron Group/Wiwynn, Inventec Corporation, Compal Electronics, etc., are selling both complete systems and partial sub systems — where final assembly is completed in the channel by integrators – into the market. Complete ODM Direct systems were previously captured in the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker as a component of “Others” while partial sub system assemblies, frequently referred to as “self-built” servers, were not counted in the Tracker at all. IDC is now aggregating these server shipments under a new vendor category called “ODM Direct” with restated market data going back to Q1 2008. According to the report, ODM Direct took 6.5% of the worldwide server systems factory revenue.
For the full IDC report covering the Q3 2013 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24476413
Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.
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