Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has come out on top for worldwide server revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to Gartner.
The vendor led the market ending the year with US$3.4 billion in revenue for a total share of 22.9 per cent globally.
However, based on figures for worldwide server shipments in the quarter, Dell grew 6.5 per cent compared to the last quarter, moving into first place with 19.1 per cent total market share, suggesting strength in volume versus HPE’s win by margin.
Consequently, in terms of server shipments, HPE experienced a decline of 19.4 per cent, falling to second place with 17.2 per cent market share.
Overall, Gartner said worldwide server revenue declined 1.9 per cent year over year, while shipments fell 0.6 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2015.
Additionally, in all of 2016, global server shipments grew 0.1 percent, but server revenue declined 2.7 per cent.
Of the top five global vendors - HPE, Dell, IBM, Huawei, Lenovo - only Dell and Huawei exhibited growth for the quarter, increasing 1.8 per cent and 88.4 per cent, respectively.
"There were some distinct factors that produced the final results for 2016," Gartner Research Vice President, Jeffrey Hewitt.
"Hyperscale data centres such as Facebook and 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 virtualization and in some cases, service providers in the cloud."
Hewitt said that x86 servers continue to be the predominant platform used for large-scale data center build-outs across the globe.
“The growth of integrated systems including hyper converged integrated systems, while still relatively small as an overall percentage of the hardware infrastructure market, also provided a boost to the x86 server space for the year,” he added.
"The outlook for 2017 suggests that modest growth will occur being driven primarily by service provider build-outs while the enterprise will show a slight decline in unit purchases with only slight growth in revenue."
From a regional perspective, Asia-Pacific was the only region to exhibit positive growth in both shipments and revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to Gartner.
