HP and x86 dominate a growing first-quarter global server market

Dell, Cisco and IBM bring up the rear

HP is leading the worldwide server market with around a quarter of total sales, according to the latest figures from Gartner and IDC.

HP, which recently updated its server range, accounted for 24.9 percent of the first-quarter server market according to IDC, and 23.8 percent according to Gartner.

Both analyst firms have Dell in second place - IDC gives it 18 percent and Gartner 17.1 percent - and IBM in third place with 13.2 and 14.1 percent respectively.

IDC has Lenovo and Cisco tied in fourth place, but Gartner puts Lenovo a shade ahead of its rival.

Gartner's figures show that Lenovo has leapfrogged Cisco over the past year and has taken most of its market share from IBM, which lost some five percent during the period, after Lenovo completed its takeover of IBM's x86 server business.

Gartner said that the market benefited from a particularly strong start to the year, particularly for x86 servers, which saw shipment increases of 13 percent and revenue increases of 14.5 percent against 2014.

"The first quarter of 2015 was a particularly strong start to the year, with the strongest shipment growth since the third quarter of 2010 when the market was recovering from the downturn. It was also the second largest volume quarter ever," said Adrian O'Connell, research director at Gartner.

"The market was driven by particularly strong demand from the hyperscale area, which benefited North America in particular. This comes at a time when other regions are struggling due to price pressure driven by the appreciation of the US dollar."

IDC also noted the hyperscale effect, saying that demand for high-end systems led to a revenue increase of 45 percent over the year to $2.1bn.

"We continue to see a market profile that is increasingly driven by new compute deployment scenarios, often in hyperscale data centres," said Al Gillen, programme vice president for servers and system software at IDC.

"These customers tend to buy in large contracts, creating considerable variability within any given quarter. This variability is usually associated with density-optimised server products."