FRAMINGHAM, Mass., September 8, 2020 – According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market grew 19.8% year over year to $24.0 billion during the second quarter of 2020 (2Q20). Worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% year over year to nearly 3.2 million units in 2Q20.

In terms of server class, volume server revenue was up 22.1% to $18.7 billion, while midrange server revenue declined 0.4% to about $3.3 billion and high-end systems grew by 44.1% to $1.9 billion.

"Global demand for enterprise servers was strong during the second quarter of 2020," said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "We certainly see areas of reduced spending, but this was offset by investments made by large cloud builders and enterprises targeting solutions that support shifting infrastructure needs caused by the global pandemic. Investments in Asia/Pacific were also particularly strong, growing 31% year over year."

Overall Server Market Standings, by Company

The worldwide server market ended 2Q20 with a statistical tie* between HPE/New H3C Group and Dell Technologies for the number 1 position. HPE/New H3C Group finished the quarter with market share of 14.9% while Dell Technologies captured a 13.9% share of worldwide revenues. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems took third place with 10.5% share and impressive 77% year-over-year growth. Lenovo and IBM tied for fourth with 6.1% and 6.0% share, respectively. The ODM Direct group of vendors accounted for 28.8% of total server revenue at $6.9 billion with year-over-year growth of 63.4% and delivered 34.4% of all units shipped during the quarter.

(* IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide server market when there is a difference of one percent or less in the share of revenues or shipments among two or more vendors.)

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Top Server Market Findings

On a geographic basis, the Asia/Pacific region performed very well this quarter growing at a combined 31.%. China outperformed the competitive set, growing 39.8% year over year, followed by Japan at 24.9%, and the rest of the region (Asia/Pacific excluding Japan and China) at 13.4%. The United States also grew 25.0% year over year while Canada declined 11.2%. Latin America was able to grow 15.6% while Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) declined 5.8% year over year.

Revenue generated from x86 servers decreased 17.4% in 2Q20 to $21.6 billion. Non-x86 servers grew revenues 47.4% year over year to around $2.4 billion.

IDC's Server Taxonomy

IDC's Server Taxonomy maps the eleven price bands within the server market into three price ranges: volume servers, midrange servers and high-end servers. The revenue data presented in this release is stated as vendor revenue for a server system. IDC presents data in vendor revenue to determine market share position. Vendor revenue represents those dollars recognized by multi-user system and server vendors for ISS (initial server shipment) and upgrade units sold through direct and indirect channels and includes the following embedded server components: Frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communications boards, operating system software, other bundled software and initial internal and external disk shipments.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global server market on a quarterly basis. The Tracker includes quarterly unit shipments and revenues (both vendor revenue and value of shipments), segmented by vendor, family, model, region, operating system, price band, CPU type, and architecture. The Server Tracker is part of the Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, which provides a holistic total addressable market view of the five key enabling infrastructure technologies for the datacenter (servers, external enterprise storage systems, purpose-built appliances: HCI and PBBA, and datacenter switches).