Asia Pacific sees growth as server revenue declines globally

As server revenue declined globally, Asia Pacific was the only region to show positive growth in both shipments and revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016, market research firm Gartner said on Thursday.

The worldwide server revenue declined 1.9 percent (year over year) in the fourth quarter of 2016 while shipments fell 0.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2015.

In 2016, worldwide server shipments grew 0.1 percent but server revenue declined 2.7 percent.

"Hyperscale data centres (like Facebook, Google) grew and, at the same time, drove some significant server replacements. Enterprises grew at a lower rate as they continued to leverage server applications through virtualisation and in some cases, service providers in the cloud," explained Jeffrey Hewitt, Research Vice President at Gartner.

From a regional perspective, Asia Pacific region exhibited positive growth in both shipments and revenue. All other regions declined, with Latin America experiencing the largest decline in shipments (12.2 percent), while the Middle East and Africa declined 14.7 percent in terms of revenue.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) led the worldwide server market based on revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016.

The company ended the year with $3.4 billion in revenue for a total share of 22.9 percent worldwide. However, revenue was down 11 percent compared with the same quarter in 2015.

Of the top five global vendors, only Dell and Huawei exhibited growth for the quarter, increasing 1.8 percent and 88.4 percent, respectively.

Dell grew 6.5 percent and moved into the top position in worldwide server shipments in the fourth quarter of 2016, with 19.1 percent of the market.

--IANS

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