The Australian server market has grown in terms of revenue, but shrunk in terms of unit shipments.
Research from Gartner reveals Australian server revenue increased 24.7 percent to $299 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, up from $240 million in the same period in 2017. Revenue for the full year hit past $1 billion, up 22.8 percent from 2017.
However server shipments fell to 21,000 units, compared to just under $23,000 in Q4 of 2017. For the full year however, shipments remained steady with just under $84,600 units.
Gartner senior principal analyst Kiyomi Yamada offered a possible explanation for the odd combination of increased revenue and smaller shipments: he opined that lower DRAM prices increased demand for memory-rich configurations to support emerging workloads like AI and analytics, which helped buoy server prices. “Product managers should market higher memory content servers to take advantage of DRAM oversupplies,” Yamada said.
Meanwhile the worldwide server market saw a 17.8 percent increase in revenue in the fourth quarter to US$21.8 billion, with shipments also up 8.5 percent to 3.47 million units year over year.
“Hyperscale and service providers continued to increase their investments in their data centres (albeit at lower levels than at the start of 2017) to meet customers’ rising service demand, as well as enterprises’ services purchases from cloud providers,” Yamada said.
“To exploit data centre infrastructure market disruption, technology product managers for server providers should prepare for continued increases in server demand through 2019, although growth will be a slower pace than in 2018.”
Dell EMC in Q4 led all vendors with a 20.2 percent market share with US$4.4 billion in revenues, with HPE coming in second at 17.7 percent with US$3.8 billion in revenues.
Third-place Huawei meanwhile saw the most revenue growth at 45.9 percent at US$1.8 billion. IBM's server revenues declined 32 percent.
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