RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Sales of servers around the world soared in the first quarter of 2018, delivering especially good news for three tech giants with operations in RTP.
Research firm International Data Corporation reports “historic demand” for the hardware is being driven by cloud computing as well as a “product refresh cycle” and new chip technology. Revenues climbed nearly 39 percent over the same time period in 2017 to $18.8 billion with the number of units being shipped growing by 21 percent to 2.7 million machines.
The first-quarter performance was the best to date for the server business, based on IDC statistics.
Lenovo, which bases its server operations in RTP, cashed in on the global demand with its revenues jumping 50 percent year-over-year, IDC reports.
The business group also is continuing to recover from a reorganization and changes in leadership.
IBM, meanwhile, saw its sales jump 33 percent.
And IDC reports that Cisco enjoyed a 19 percent gain.
Lenovo focuses on x86 server models, and IDC noted that demand for those servers increased 41 percent to $17.4 billion.
Non-x86 server sales, meanwhile, grew 15.5 percent to $1.4 billion.
The three companies are tied for third place in global market share behind Dell and HP, which are tied for the top spot and also recorded big gains.
The quarterly double-digit sales improvement is the third straight, IDC noted.
“This historic demand for servers is driven by a market-wide enterprise refresh cycle, strong demand from cloud service providers, increased use of servers as the core building blocks for software-defined infrastructure, broad demand for newer CPUs such as Intel’s Purely platform, and growing deployments of next generation workloads. Average selling prices (ASPs) increased during the quarter due to richer configurations and increased component costs,” IDC reported. “The increased ASPs also contributed to revenue growth.”
The entire report can be read online.
“Hyperscale growth continued to drive server volume demand in the first quarter,” said Sanjay Medvitz, senior research analyst, Servers and Storage at IDC. “While various OEMs are finding success in this space, ODMs remain the primary beneficiary from the quickly growing hyperscale server demand, now accounting for roughly a quarter of overall server market revenue and shipments.”
