FRAMINGHAM, Mass., December 3, 2014 – According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market increased 4.8% year over year to $12.7 billion in the third quarter of 2014 (3Q14).

This is the second consecutive quarter that the server market has experienced a year-over-year improvement in worldwide revenue. Server unit shipments improved 5.7% year over year in 3Q14 to 2.38 million units as investments in hyperscale datacenter capacity expansion continue to aggressively reshape the core server market. Additionally, IDC continues to see signs of a server refresh cycle, which we expect will continue to lift the market into 2015.

On a year-over-year basis, volume systems experienced 8.8% revenue growth. This was the sixth consecutive quarter that volume system demand increased year over year. Midrange systems also experienced growth of 18.4% year over year as technology refresh cycles began to positively impact the segment, while high-end enterprise systems experienced a year-over-year revenue decline of -23.2% primarily because of difficult year-over-year comparisons and product cyclicality issues.

Blade servers, which are highly leveraged in enterprise’s virtualized and converged environments, increased 1.9% year over year to $2.3 billion. Blades now account for 18.0% of total server revenue. HP maintained the number 1 spot in the blade server market in 3Q14 with 43.2% revenue share; Cisco and IBM held the second and third positions in the blade market with 25.6% and 14.6% revenue share, respectively.

To read the full press release, which includes a data table showing worldwide vendor revenue, market share, and year-over-year growth for the top 5 server vendors, please go to the following URL —
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25288114